


home is where i call the ghost my own

by greencacti



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, M/M, Small Towns, an unrealistically happy high school??, excessive use of the word 'fuck', good timez, lots of teen angst!!!, mikey is in this but.....not as much as i intended for him to be, there aren't actually any ghosts in this and the title is misleading lmao, this was supposed to be a halloween story but it's really......not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 23:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8420587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greencacti/pseuds/greencacti
Summary: "Gerard almost laughed. Confirmed: he was such a mess that even fate itself couldn't predict how he was going to fuck up next. It was honestly poetic. "Or, urban legends start coming to life around Gerard after his family moves to a tiny, forgotten desert town and he meets an odd being with glowing eyes, a lip ring, and shitty taste in horror movies on a strange night in October.





	

**Author's Note:**

> there's a lot of inspiration behind this fic! the basis for it came from the halloween tree by ray bradbury - although you can really only see the connection if you squint - and i'd also definitely say it was inspired by the fic the anatomy of a fall by novembersmith, which i'm sure everybody has already read but if you haven't i highly recommend it. there aren't a TON of similarities - the beginnings are def very alike tho, which i didn't really intend for or realize until it was finished, so i wholeheartedly applogize for that - but i figured it was still worth mentioning.
> 
> quick warning, there is a LOT of mention of death in this story. there's also a brief mention of suicide and a scene with mentions of child abuse. there's nothing graphic, but keep that in mind if those are subjects you would rather not read about!
> 
> the title from this fic comes from the song ghost to me by youth lagoon and TECHINICALLY is a little misleading because, while there are SPIRITS in this fic, there aren't any GHOSTS. there's a difference...you'll see.

_PART I: SOMETHING NOT UNLIKE MYSELF_

"Holy shit, a cactus. An actual cactus. I've never seen one in real life before," Mikey exclaimed, leaning his head out the car window.

At that point, they had seen just about every other piece of cliche southwestern United States imagery imaginable, including horses, snakes, and what had appeared to be an actual fucking cowboy, so a cactus wasn't that much of a stretch. They had spent the past three days driving from New Jersey to New Mexico, and about six hours that day driving through endless desert trying to find the tiny town of Far Water, which, at this point, Gerard was starting to believe didn't actually exist. Every time his dad spotted someone and and asked to be pointed in the right direction of Far Water, Gerard half-expected the person to ominously reply that the whole town had burned to the ground thirty years ago or something.

("Dad, just use a map, Jesus Christ," Gerard had whined, about three hours earlier. Other than the odd person he would ask for directions, his dad relied solely on the car's GPS system and had unending faith in it, even though it got them lost more often than to their destination.

"Maps are old news. This is where it's at. We used to have to pull over and read maps when we got lost - the GPS does all that work for you! This is your generation's technology, you need to catch up. Get with the program," his father teased.

"Yeah, get with the program, Gee," Mikey had repeated with a laugh.)

A few weeks earlier, his dad had come home from work looking overjoyed and announced his boss was starting a new chapter of their company out west, and he'd been asked to work there. It meant a huge raise in pay and benefits, at the "small price" of having to move out to the middle of nowhere in the New Mexican desert. Gerard wasn't sure why his dad's boss thought starting a new location of his company in a city no one had ever heard of in the middle of the desert was a good business move, but since the original location was in a part of New Jersey that was mostly known for being dangerous and occasionally featured on The Sopranos, his boss probably wasn't that great of a businessman in the first place.

The business itself wasn't in Far Water; it was in a city that supposedly "nearby", but when Gerard had looked it up, it was apparently more than an hour and a half away from there and could only be reached on roads that required tolls. He had never heard of the city either, but it was pretty decently sized and, from the photos he had seen, wasn't _too_ different from home. But living costs in the city were high, too high even with his father's raise, and they couldn't afford to live there. When Gerard first heard that, he'd felt a glimmer of hope that the move would be cancelled, but then his father announced since they couldn't live in the city, they would just live in a nearby town instead, which would be more "scenic" anyway. His parents had looked into a bunch of towns that were nearby, and apparently found some issue with every single one that was anywhere near the city, because Far Water was the only one they could settle on that was within their means.

"There was a cactus right outside our new house in the picture the realtor sent us. You'll get to see one every day," their mother mused. Gerard suspected she wasn't particularly happy about the move, but was trying to remain neutral. She _was_ happy about the money, and she wasn't extremely fond of the part of Jersey they lived in because it was pretty dangerous, but she had always lived on the east coast and, as far as Gerard knew, had planned to always remain there. Gerard wasn't sure how he or his mom, his fake nails, bleach blonde, Jersey as fuck mom, would fit in in Far Water, because he knew nothing about social climate there, and, moreover, literally _nothing_ about New Mexico at all. No one in the family had ever been there before, and frankly, Gerard thought they probably should have visited Far Water, or, at least, New Mexico in general before just up and moving there, but his father had insisted there was no time and it would cost too much in gas.

Gerard had easily been the most bitter about the move before, but now that they were actually there, actually hundreds of miles from the only place he had ever called home, he was even more mad about it. Everything about New Mexico that he had seen so far was so different than home. It was early October but still warm, much warmer than Jersey ever was in the beginning of fall. Back home this was the time of year people would start wearing light jackets and long pants, but here the average temperatures were still in the high 60s.

To make matters worse, school had already started, like, two months ago. Gerard's school had only been back in session for about three weeks, but apparently the school year in the south started earlier. Gerard grimaced thinking about it. If there was anything worse than starting at a new high school in senior year, it was starting at a new high school almost two months late.

Gerard glanced over his comic book at Mikey. Mikey was lucky - he was a freshman. No one expected freshmen to know how to find anything in the school until like halfway through the year anyway, so it didn't matter that he was starting late. Half the kids in his classes probably wouldn't be able to find the right room anyway, and he could slip in unnoticed. Gerard was a senior, and seniors knew where their classes were. They would probably all be in their seats by the time Gerard stumbled in, probably like five minutes late, which meant it would be pretty hard to miss him and which could result in him, dear God, having to introduce himself to the class.

Mikey was also great at making friends; Mikey always had friends. He was quiet but in a thoughtful kind of way, and he was a huge hipster nerd that attracted other hipster nerds who wanted to discuss The Smiths and shit. He was a little strange, sure, but not strange the way Gerard was. He wasn't off-putting. He was strange like he wore his glasses perched at the end of his nose and refused to push them up, not strange like he spent the better part of ten years holed up in his room. People loved Mikey - _including_ girls. There were plenty of little scene-phase freshmen who were apparently drawn to his sleepy eyes and pirated Disney movie empire. If you could get past the whole monotone voice thing, evidently, you were pretty much already halfway to falling in love with him. Gerard, on the other hand...didn't really draw people in. He had never really had friends.

Interestingly, Mikey was less upset about the move than Gerard, even though he actually had friends he was leaving behind. Gerard hadn't exactly been _happy_ at his old school - in fact, he hated pretty much every second he was there, because he was a cliche teenager and there were few things in life he hated more than high school - but he was fine there. The _people_ weren't the reason he hated it. He didn't really have friends, sure, but everyone left him and his black eyeliner alone. He didn't know how the people at his new school - his new school with a student body of a whopping 170 total - would react to him; Far Water was, at least according to Google, very small, very secluded, and very old-fashioned. He tried to convince himself that he didn't really give a fuck whether they liked him or not, but he had heard lots of horror stories about people who were rejected in their small towns, and frankly, he just wanted to lie low for the year and then get the hell out. He was thinking of art schools in New York, closer to the coast, closer to home.

"Is that it? Is that it?" his mother asked, pointing out the windshield. Finally, in the near distance, nestled among the sand dunes, they could see a tiny town. Gerard didn't know how any of them were even supposed to know if it was Far Water or not; he had seen about five actual pictures of the town total, including the photo of their new house. Google Images had come up with mostly pictures of maps or old black-and-white photos that dated fifty years back or more. Evidently, not even the fifteen hundred people who lived there thought it was relevant enough to photograph.

However, Gerard could see that it was, indeed, Far Water, New Mexico, founded 1637, population 1,568, as proclaimed by the sign they were approaching. Apparently, it was located more than an hour off the interstate and could be reached only by back- and side-roads, which explained why they had had to comb what felt like entire fucking New Mexican countryside to find it. The fact that, as far as Gerard could tell, they could see what appeared to be the entire town from there was a bad sign. It was even smaller than he had imagined - claustrophobically small - and had a dusty, musty look to it, the kind of forgotten look Gerard imagined a ghost town would have. All he could see were old buildings, a church with a threateningly large cross affixed to the roof, a graveyard, wooden fences, trees, and mountains looming in the distance. And that was it. It was alone, isolated in the middle of actual fucking nowhere. Beyond it was only more desert, more roads. Far Water was clearly the kind of place that most people just passed through on the way to somewhere else.

"You have arrived at your destination," the GPS's robotic voice announced.

"See! I told you it would get us there!" his father exclaimed triumphantly as they pulled into town.

"This is there? There's nothing here," Mikey replied with wide eyes.

He wasn't far off; there really wasn't anything in Far Water, or, at least, nothing that looked familiar. As they drove down the main street - known only as Main Street, of course - Gerard searched for stores he recognized from home, at least a CVS or something, some kind of national chain to remind them they were still in the same country, but most of the ones he saw were local, places like "Patricia's Bakery" and "Adam's Hardware". That was it. Gerard's days of normal shit like Dunkin Donuts were clearly over.

"What kind of stores are these? No chains? Where's the fucking capitalism?" Gerard groaned, staring out the window.

"Good news. I think I see a 7/11," Mikey announced, squinting at a store in the distance.

Gerard peered out of Mikey's window. "What's that next to it? Is that an actual swamp?" he snorted.

There was, indeed, a 7/11 at the very end of the block. Beyond it was a thicket of trees too difficult to see through, but Gerard could just make out what looked to be a dark lagoon almost hidden in the underbrush.

"A swamp next to a 7/11. Interesting layout around here," Mikey mused.

"That's a ravine, not a swamp," their mother corrected. As they drove past it, Gerard could see that she was right. It wasn't a lagoon at all; it was just a deep crag in the earth, so deep that apparently light could not escape it, with a "Danger, No Trespassing" sign posted just before it at the forest's edge. Comforting scenery.

"Whatever it is, it's a change of scene! We all need that sometimes, right?" their dad said cheerfully. Unlike the rest of the family that was relatively neutral on the move - or, in Gerard's case, just pissed about it - his dad was _overjoyed._ Here was the chance to get out of "fucking Jersey" and move to somewhere, as he had explained it, "more natural". He had spent the several weeks leading up to the move enthusiastically telling the family random facts about New Mexico, a place he had never actually been to before and Gerard was certain he never gave a shit about until it became his ticket out of Belleville. "Did you know that New Mexico has _four_ official state songs?" he would excitedly ask.

Gerard hadn't known that, or that New Mexico's population was 2.086 million, or that its official state flower was the Yucca flower, or that it was the fifth-largest state (above Arizona, below Montana), but at this point, he'd heard those facts so many times he was pretty sure they were permanently burned into his brain. "We gotta get Dad to stop before he gets the New Mexico state motto, like, tattooed on his ass or something. This is out of control," he had said to Mikey a few days earlier while they were packing up their rooms. In an imitation of his father's voice, he said, "' _Crescit eundo_ \- it grows as it goes'! Isn't that inspirational, kids?"

Mikey laughed. "If he wanted to move to a state with a good motto, he should have picked, like, California. Theirs is 'eureka', which means 'I have found it' in Greek, I think? That fucking speaks to me."

He was only half-joking. Mikey always knew facts like that off the top of his head - he was _really_ , really smart. He could succeed no matter where he went, which was probably part of the reason he wasn't as upset by the move as Gerard was. Mikey knew how to go with the flow, maintaining the unbreakable poker face through it all; Gerard sure didn't.

They made up for the lost time spent looking for the town with the fact that they found their neighborhood within about two minutes of arrival because the whole town was _that fucking small._ The street was lined with near-identical old houses. Each one was painted a different color, but other than that they all looked almost exactly the same. The whole town had already had an alarmingly wholesome feel to it; almost every person they had passed on the way to the house who had caught Gerard's eye had smiled and waved at him, which, okay, was the polite thing to do, but it was still a little much for him, and this neighborhood where every house had identical cute matching shutters and identical cute front porches was not helping the situation. The whole thing was getting a little creepy. He wondered it was too late to turn around and drive back to mean, capitalist civilization.

"This one's ours!" his dad announced as he pulled up in front of one of the identical cute houses. "See? There's the cactus."

/

The new house didn't have a basement or attic for Gerard to claim as his own and disappear into. Mikey and Gerard's rooms were both on the third floor and had old wood floors and strange wallpaper with wild animals on it for some reason. Seeing the room in real life felt weird; even though he had seen the photo of it about a hundred times, it still hadn't felt like a real place (which was probably partially because of that wallpaper, because what the fuck, who would ever willingly decorate their house like that?) The room was smaller than it had looked in the photo, but he found that kind of comforting. Their new house was so much bigger than their old one, with so many huge windows and open spaces, and it was kind of nice to have a room that was kind of small and cramped like his room back home had been. (Though honestly, the move was probably a blessing in disguise when it came to Gerard's room, because he had finally had to take everything out and clean it. His room at home hadn't been properly cleaned in _years -_ his mom had long given up on making him clean it, instead just insisting he keep the door closed so she "didn't have to see that shit" _-_ and he was pretty sure that by that point all the garbage under his bed had become sentient, organized, and set up a government of elected officials. It was that bad.)

His room was at the back of the house, and he could see practically the whole town from his window. He could see the graveyard, and beyond the graveyard he could see the church, and beyond the church he could see the school, and in the distance he could see the forest and the ravine and, most importantly, the 7/11. Good to know that even in his new, unfamiliar terrain, slurpees and shitty coffee were always within reach.

"Gerard!" Mikey called from his room. The walls were so paper-thin, it practically sounded like he was in the same room. "Did you see the graveyard in the backyard? Holy shit." He didn't even sound that surprised by it; Mikey admittedly didn't sound surprised that often, but honestly, from what Gerard had seen thus far, a graveyard in the backyard was the kind of thing he'd expect from Far Water. A 7/11 next to a dangerous ravine, a graveyard in the backyard. Same shit.

The graveyard technically wasn't actually part of their backyard, but it was so close it might as well have been. "Maybe the house is built on top of, like, an ancient burial ground, like in _Poltergeist_ ," Gerard called back. "If we find out this house is haunted, I swear to God, I'm out. I'm gone. I will _walk_ back to Jersey if I have to. If you guys wanna stick around and get possessed by some Navajo spirit, that's fine, but I'm not risking it."

/

Dinner that been uncharacteristically quiet. Usually Gerard's grandparents came over for dinner and the whole family ate together, camped around the table in the dining room, bumping elbows and laughing, and the table felt incomplete without them. A bunch of the lightbulbs in the house were burnt out and his dad swore he would get new ones, but not until tomorrow, so they ate in the dark, the table illuminated only by their cell phone flashlights, which really hadn't helped the new house feel any more home-y. The house was a "fixer-upper" that Gerard was sure his parents had no intentions to fix; it had loose floorboards, rusty nails embedded into the stairs, wallpaper coming down in some rooms, the works. No lights just completed the unwelcoming aesthetic.

Mikey had disappeared into his room immediately after dinner, claiming he was going to unpack but instead he sat silently on his mattress on the floor of his room for three hours, surrounded by moving boxes, reading until he fell asleep. Gerard didn't blame him for wanting to be alone; three days in the car had been draining, and if he hadn't had the idea of having to start at a new school hanging over his head, he probably would've barricaded himself in his room and went to sleep too. Gerard could never sleep when he was anxious, so instead he spent the evening trying to make his room feel like home, filling the bookshelf with his DVDs and video games instead of books and tacking up his posters to cover the wildebeest or whatever the fuck they were supposed to be on the wallpaper. He lugged his tiny TV upstairs, set it on the floor, and settled for watching infomercials - the only channels he could get on the TV until they got their cable hooked up - until the rest of his family went to sleep and the house was silent.

He couldn't sleep; it was too quiet. At home it never got this quiet at night, and Gerard had never been able to hear the house creak and settle like this before. He knew all houses did, especially old houses like this one, but only in the middle of nowhere would you actually be able to hear it. It was _so_ _loud_ \- how did people here ever sleep? Maybe they didn't, Gerard considered - maybe everyone in Far Water was a vampire, and at night they hid in the shadows of the cacti and in the dark corners that the street lamps and moonbeams didn't touch, looking for newcomers like him to prey on. Being turned into a vampire might not be so bad, Gerard decided, but if it meant spending the rest of his eternity in the fucking badlands, he'd pass.

Even the _sky_ was different here, he thought, staring out the window. He could see so many more stars than usual, and the moon beamed brighter than he had ever seen it before. Technically that was a good thing because it meant the air was less polluted - his dad sure would be pleased - but it would have been nice for something, _anything_ to be the same. Even their furniture was different; the house was rented and it came with a lot of the furniture, and okay, sure, the kitchen table and couch and shit back home hadn't technically been theirs either because they rented there too, but they had lived there long enough that it _felt_ theirs. Everything here was just too unfamiliar.

He pulled the blanket tighter around himself - at least that was his - and tried to ignore the moon, and the creaks, and the cacti, and the fact that he had to be up at 6:30 the next day.

/

"It was _not_ my fault that I woke up late. How was I supposed to know that fucking outlet didn't work?" Gerard grumbled.

"It's an old house, you shouldn't have just assumed," his mother replied. "Stop bitching, you'll be late."

The kitchen, with its huge windows, was predictably sunny and bright the next morning. Gerard hunched down further over his mug of coffee, scowling at the sunlight like it had done something to personally offend him. Too bright, too early. He had thankfully had the foresight to unpack the most _important_ kitchen appliance - the coffeemaker - the night before, so at least he had his coffee, and so far, that was about the only good thing that had happened in the entire time he had been in Far Water. Which, okay, he had only been in for, like, 18 hours, but it had been a pretty miserable 18 hours.

He didn't know what time he had finally gotten to sleep the night before, but he woke up to his mother banging on his door, shouting that he had overslept and if he didn't get up _right that goddamn minute_ she would bust the door down (which, coming from her, was no empty threat). His alarm hadn't gone off; he had set the alarm on his phone to go off at 6:30 and then plugged it in to charge, but apparently the outlet by his bed didn't work because his phone had just died instead of charging. He actually did have a real alarm clock, but he couldn't find it in the boxes the night before and figured the alarm on his phone would be good enough. Apparently not, because here he was, no time to shower and a dead phone on his first day at his new school. Gerard might have been notorious for infrequent showers, but it had been at least six or seven days since his last one, even he knew it was starting to get a little gruesome. He had been _counting_ on a shower that morning.

Mikey smiled. "It was the work of the Navajo spirit. You offended it."

Their mother shook her head. "Honey. Please. I love you dearly, but you need to get your fucking act together," she said. Gerard took a long swig of his coffee and didn't answer.

"Look on the bright side. You still smell like home, I guess, because you haven't showered since we left," Mikey said. Gerard laid his head on Mikey's shoulder; _Mikey_ still smelled like home, or, at least, he still smelled like Mikey _,_ even though he had actually had time to shower. He smelled like peppermint Altoids, deodorant, coffee grounds, and laundry detergent, the way he always did. Gerard probably smelled like...someone who hadn't washed their hair in six days, because that's what he was.

"Wow. I'm gonna make a great first impression," Gerard said flatly.

/

The first thing that happened to Gerard on his first day at his new school was a fucking wardrobe malfunction, because things were clearly just not gonna go his way that morning.

Mikey had, to be fair, suggested that maybe going into his first day at a new school dressed in all black, complete with the biggest, most oversized hoodie he could find, hadn't been a great plan, but Gerard had just pulled his hood up and said it was fine. And it _was_ fine, at least, until they got to school and Gerard realized he had a fucking _hole_ in the back of his jeans.

He hadn't even noticed until, like, an hour after he put them on, not until they got all the way to school, into the building, and the first bell had rung. Things really hadn't been too bad up until that point; the new kids had seemed okay. As he and Mikey had walked through the parking lot up to the building, he got more than a few stares that indicated he was probably the only guy wandering around the campus of La Puebla High School wearing 99 cent eyeliner, but nobody said anything. In a bad coming-of-age movie, this was the part where the main school jock would confront him, call him a faggot, and then shove him into a locker, but even if he did look like a 2007 Myspace scene kid, everyone left him alone, just like the kids back home had. They looked at him, and then looked away immediately. Gerard was pretty impressed; he had to admit that they were damn good at staying in their own lanes when it came to some outsider rolling up to their school dressed like an emo drug dealer.

Most of them looked, surprisingly, _really_ happy that day. Sure, Gerard had known people who didn't necessarily hate school back home, but people who looked this delighted to be there, at 7:30 AM no less, were pretty few and far between. Maybe this was one of those small schools with a "great community" or whatever that Gerard's dad had always talked about wanting to get him and Mikey into. His dad would be ecstatic to see this; in the less than 24 hours they had been there, unlike Gerard, he had pretty much decided Far Water and all the people there were of God-tier status. When one of their new neighbors brought over a pumpkin pie after dinner to welcome them to the neighborhood, Gerard thought his dad was literally going to pass out. He was glad his dad was happy, but Jesus, he wasn't sure if he could digest this much joy. It seemed unnatural.

The school itself was an old, old brick building located just at the edge of the forest, with wooden floors - Gerard had never even seen a school with anything other than institutional tile flooring, let alone creaky wooden floors - and rattly old lockers. Once the bell rung and the hallways steadily cleared of students, once it was just him and Mikey wandering the empty halls, the school started to take on a little bit of a creepy atmosphere. If anyone wanted to make a horror movie about a haunted school, Gerard thought, La Puebla would be a prime filming location. The fact that the school's mascot was the Phantoms, of all things, seemed pretty fitting. If they had run into Scooby and Shaggy on the way to the main office, Gerard would have been completely unsurprised.

"If you think this is bad, just imagine the basement," Mikey replied when Gerard voiced his thoughts about the school. The school was four floors, with one floor to a grade, and the freshmen like Mikey were in the basement. The school was weirdly huge for such a small student body; it had a different main office for each grade and a billion lockers and supposedly some really huge library that, if it did exist, they couldn't find. They couldn't really find anything - the room numbers went in a weird order and every hallway looked the same. For what felt like ages they wandered, looking for some indication of where to go; they were on the ground floor, the tenth-grade floor, where neither of them were supposed to be, but they couldn't find the stairs to get to the right places. They had walked up and down the main hallway probably ten times before Mikey finally spotted the tiny sign on one of the doors indicating that it was a stairwell.

They split in the stairwell, Mikey going down to the basement and Gerard up to the top floor. The stairs were metal and the stairwell was sort of dimly lit, giving the whole place a weird feeling, like it belonged in a jail or mausoleum instead of a school. Gerard sort of felt like he should have been carrying a torch or something; that was the vibe the stairwell had. As he got closer and closer to the top floor he started to get more and more anxious about going to his first new class, and he almost wanted a cigarette right there, which felt pretty ironic considering there were "No Smoking" signs posted at every landing in the stairwell. It wasn't that he was really that shy, or didn't like talking to people - Mikey would laugh at the idea of _Gerard_ of all people not liking to talk - but the idea of walking into a room full of strangers still made his stomach drop.

The stairwell was stuffy to begin with, and the air got weirdly hotter and hotter as he got closer to the top floor - heat rising, air convection, whatever the fuck - so, between that and his already anxious breaths, by the time he was pushing the door open to get out of the stairwell and into the senior hall he was practically gasping for air. To his delight, the first thing he laid his eyes on when he finally exited the stairwell was a bathroom. He could have a minute to get himself together in there before his first class; he was already late anyway, another ten minutes wouldn't kill him. Back home, the school bathrooms were basically Gerard's safe havens. They were practically sacred. Any time he really could not handle what was going on in class - and had too many absences to just peace the fuck out and leave without losing credit in the class - he would ask to go to the bathroom, splash water on his face, and bide his time to figure out how long he could stay in there before the teacher caught on. He could avoid a full half-hour of class if he played his cards right.

The bathroom was _cold -_ Jesus, the heating/cooling system at this school was messed up _-_ but it helped Gerard cool down a little and catch his breath. When he caught a glance of himself in the cracked mirror above the sinks - tangled hair, black-rimmed eyes, pale as fucking ever, could probably pass as a dead body in the right circumstances, the usual - he noticed something seemed a little...off about his jeans, and they were sagging a little oddly in the back, and upon further inspection, he realized, of course, it was because there was a _hole_. Like, an unmistakable, impossible to miss hole. Sure, Gerard was kind of a mess, both literally and figuratively, but revealing this to everyone by wandering into his first-period class with greasy hair and a hole in his pants presenting his fucking Star Wars boxers to the world hadn't exactly been part of his plan.

"Are you fucking _kidding_ me," Gerard growled under his breath. What the hell was going on? Jesus, if he was a mess in Jersey, in Far Water he was a walking disaster. At least back home when his clothes had holes it was for _aesthetic reasons_ , not because he just couldn't get his life together and, while running on something like two hours asleep, wasn't able to notice a giant hole on his ass. Gerard wasn't the type to get super worked up over his appearance, but this was...a really big hole. It was 8 in the morning, he was about to walk into a room full of strangers, his phone was at 11% - the highest he had been able to charge it in the time between when he woke up and leaving the house - and now he was apparently rocking some fucked-up pants. Things could not get worse.

"Holy shit...this day, man, this day," he laughed bitterly and rubbed his eyes. He almost jumped a foot when he heard the toilet flush and stall behind him creak open - literally _creak_ open, it sounded like a _Tales From The Crypt_ sound effect - and in the mirror he saw a halo of curls emerge from the stall. Cool, there had been a person in the bathroom with him, hearing him talk to himself, the whole time. Things just kept getting better.

He whipped around to face another kid who, at the very least, didn't look like the type to try and corner him and beat him up. He pretty much towered over Gerard, and his hair probably added a few inches, but he didn't seem particularly intimidating. Gerard probably wouldn't have thought anything of him if he didn't know this kid had definitely just heard him monologue to himself about his ripped pants. "Are you okay, man?" the kid asked, looking puzzled.

"Uh, yeah," Gerard said too quickly, gripping onto the sink so hard his knuckles turned white. He was _definitely_ acting natural. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?" the kid pressed. "I didn't mean to...listen in, or anything, but I overheard you and you sounded pretty upset." He looked _genuinely worried_ about Gerard, even though they had never even seen each other before that moment. Gerard wasn't sure if he would ever get used to this small-town hospitality thing.

Gerard had two options here: brush off the kid and go to class with his entire ass out, or ask the kid for help and hope he was as nice as he looked. He figured this was his best shot at some kind of fix - maybe the kid had, like, duct tape or something? Gerard had already embarrassed himself in front of this guy; he really had nothing to lose at that point.

"My pants are...fucked up," Gerard said, only realizing how bad that sounded after it had already left his mouth. Jesus, this guy probably thought he was nuts. In his head, Gerard tried to calculate the probability of not having any classes with him in a school as small as La Puebla and not having to actually face him again.

"What?" the kid asked, eyes wide.

"Like...there's a hole in them," Gerard tried to explain.

The kid _visibly relaxed_. Nice, he had thought Gerard had, like, shit himself or something. Gerard had never been that great at first impressions, but this was on a whole new level of bad. "Oh!" the kid said brightly. "I can help with that! I help run the school store - I'll get you a pair of sweatpants from there!"

Gerard could have kissed him. "Really? Holy shit, thanks," he sputtered. "Aren't you going to be, like, late to class though?"

"No, it's no problem, just let me wash my hands," he said, moving towards the sink and turning on the faucet. "I have a free this period anyway, so all I normally do is help the librarian shelve books. I'm not missing anything." He used his free to _help the librarian shelve books;_ back home, no one Gerard knew would even dream of spending a free period doing that. These people were _so fucking nice_ it was almost unsettling. The kid turned off the faucet and opened the bathroom door. "Come on, I'll take you there."

The kid led him down the hallway and around a corner. "Are you new? I've never seen you before," he asked.

"Uh, yeah. I just moved here," Gerard nodded.

"In that case, welcome to desert hell," the kid said with a laugh. "Far Water fucking sucks. There's nothing to do here, except, like, go to 7/11."

"I've noticed," Gerard said with a slightly nervous laugh.

"I'm Ray," the kid introduced himself, finally giving Gerard a name to go with the face.

"Gerard," he replied.

"The school store is right next to the senior office - did you go to the office earlier, by the way? To get your schedule and stuff?" Ray asked.

"Uh, no. I was going to look for it after I got out of the bathroom, but that's when I noticed what happened to my pants," Gerard said. He was honestly pretty lucky to have run into Ray, because they went around a lot of corners and shit on the way to the senior office, and Gerard probably never would have been able to find it on his own. Ripped pants could be a blessing in disguise sometimes.

"Are you a senior?" Ray asked.

"Yeah," Gerard nodded. He wouldn't have been surprised if Ray had thought he was younger; Gerard got mistaken for being younger than he really was all the time. It was the baby face or something.

Ray smiled at him. "Me too, I bet we'll have some classes together. The senior class only has, like, 40 people. We could use some fresh blood - especially in the band. Do you play any instruments?"

"I can play a little guitar, but I'm really, really bad. You wouldn't want me in the band, trust me," Gerard said.

Ray shrugged. "You should still try - we lost, like, ten of the best musicians after they graduated this year. You should sit with us at lunch; it's a good group of guys." He chuckled. "I bet they could change your mind."

This guy was offering to let Gerard to _sit with him and his friends at lunch_. First helping him with the pants, now this. No one had ever been so nice to Gerard. It was nuts. It was too much. He was half-convinced Ray had to be playing some kind of joke. This is what his dad must have felt like when the neighbor had brought over the pie the night before. "That would be...good," Gerard said dumbly.

Ray stopped in front of a room the size of a closet and pulled the door open. "I'll be right back out - what size do you think you need?"

"Medium?" Gerard guessed. Ray disappeared into the closet and came back out holding a pair of grey sweatpants with "PHANTOMS" running down the leg. They were literally the most beautiful things Gerard had ever seen.

"Here," Ray said, handing him the sweatpants. "You can change in the closet."

By the time Gerard came out, wearing the sweatpants and with his jeans shoved into the bottom of his backpack, Ray was holding his schedule and a map of the school. "I went to get your schedule for you," he said. "Hope you don't mind, I just didn't want to be, like, awkwardly standing here while you were changing."

"No, that was, like...really fucking nice of you," Gerard said, taken a little aback. This guy was on some kind of next level of hospitality. "Thanks for all of this, actually."

Ray shook his head. "It was no problem. We have English and Stat together; you can sit by me if you want," he said, handing Gerard his schedule. "Being the new kid is tough and shit, I want to help if I can."

It was mind boggling. This guy was _too nice,_ and Gerard still was nervous, but he had normal fucking pants and it looked like he had almost made a friend, so it looked like his day could be turning around.

/

Gerard's first impression when he walked into his first class, Chemistry, was that the class was fucking _small_. The room was, like everything else in the school, enormous, with huge windows and seemingly endless rows of black lab desks, but there couldn't be more than twelve people in the class total. He was still nervous, but he breathed a little easier; back home his classes always had at least 16 or 17 kids minimum unless it was an elective, and a lot of times more. This was better. He could deal with small classes. He could deal.

"You came at the perfect time!" the teacher - Mrs. Neeley, according to his schedule - announced brightly, sounding more alive than Gerard could even imagine feeling at 8 AM on a Monday morning. "We actually just had someone transfer out of this course, and Bob needs a new lab partner, so this works out great." She pointed at a table near the window with a kid in a hoodie sitting at it. Bob, apparently, looked about as unenthusiastic about school as Gerard felt, and as Gerard approached him, he just nodded emotionlessly and put his head back down on the lab table. Someone else in the happiest town on earth who looked unenthused: nice, Gerard thought. He and Bob were practically kindred spirits.

Bob turned out to be a pretty good guy; he let Gerard copy the notes he had missed from the unit they were on (Bob's notes were, as it turned out, copied from _Ray_. Gerard was somehow completely unsurprised to hear that) and told Gerard that he had moved to Far Water from Chicago in the seventh grade, so he knew what it felt like to move. "That shit sucks," he said. "It's been five years, and I swear I'm still 'the new kid'."

That was pretty much all he said all period, but Gerard, frankly, had had enough excitement for one day, and appreciated an hour where he could calm down a little and breathe. Adjust. Recuperate.

Ray was waiting outside the classroom when the bell rung. He was clearly waiting for Bob, but Gerard was surprised when Ray waited for him to finish packing up too.

"Looking hot today, Toro. The all-white New Balances are a good look," Bob said as soon as they walked out of the classroom. Gerard was a little surprised Bob and Ray were friends at all; they seemed like such opposites.

"Shut up," Ray said, rolling eyes. He turned to Gerard. "How did your first class here in Desert Hell go?"

"Not too bad," Gerard replied.

"Neeley is good," Ray nodded. "English with Warren is gonna make you contemplate suicide though, I'm just warning you. It's this way." He motioned his hand down the hall.

"All Warren cares about is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That's it," Bob said flatly as they started walking towards the English classroom.

"What?" Gerard asked, raising his eyebrows and letting out a terrible honking laugh noise.

"He makes every assignment about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and no one knows why," Bob clarified, even though it still didn't make a lot of sense to Gerard. La Puebla really was in a league of its own. "We're analyzing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 through an eco-critical lense today. It's not as fun as it sounds. I'd skip if Toro wouldn't try to beat my ass for it."

" _Listen_. You skipped so many classes last year that you lost credit, and _I_ had to write your appeal letters for credit reinstatement _for you_ so you wouldn't have to repeat the fucking 11th grade," Ray argued. "I'm not doing that again. You're going to English, you're going to analyze how the urban setting and lack of nature in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 effects the characters' lives, and you're going to like it." Ray did it all, apparently: helped random kids with ripped pants in the bathroom, kept his friends from having to repeat grades, et cetera. Clearly he was the mom friend.

"The urban setting removes the turtles further from their natural environment than they already were and effectively puts even more distance between them and the fact that they're animals, not human," Gerard interjected.

Bob nodded at Gerard approvingly. "Holy shit. I like this kid."

/

"Is this lasagna?" Ray asked, peering at the food he had just taken from the lunch line.

"I thought it was pizza," said Patrick. Gerard had met two of Ray and Bob's friends, Pete and Patrick, in English class, and their friend Otter in the lunch line. He didn't know them that well, but they seemed to appreciate Gerard's skills at analyzing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 and didn't object to him sitting at lunch with their band kid squad, and that was, frankly, more than he could say for most of the kids back home.

"I love how the school lunches slowly decline a little more every year," Pete said cheerfully. "Last year, sure, they tasted bad, but at least we could tell what they were. Now this shit is completely unrecognizable."

Ray steered Gerard out the cafeteria door and towards a picnic table in the connecting courtyard. Gerard was surprised to see that literally everyone he had had class with earlier was also there. "Does the whole grade have lunch together?" he asked.

"The whole school does," Bob replied, rolling his eyes. "That's why we eat here. Most of the freshmen and sophomores eat in the cafeteria, and they are _so fucking loud_."

"Everyone eats together? You don't have lunch periods? That's fucking nuts. A riot would have broken out, like, once a week if it had been like that at my old school," Gerard said, bewildered. He scanned the courtyard for signs of Mikey; if the cafeteria was as _fucking loud_ as Bob claimed, Gerard was sure Mikey wouldn't want to eat in there. He breathed a little sigh of relief when he saw that Mikey sitting under a tree with three other kids; he had survived the first half of the day and had, at least, made some friendly acquaintances. "Oh, I see my brother over there."

Patrick followed Gerard's eyes across the courtyard to the spot Gerard was looking at and laughed. "Hey, Ray, look, he's eating with your brother!" he said. Gerard was kind of unsurprised; friendliness just ran in the Toro family, apparently. "Woah, watch out," Patrick continued, "He's also eating with Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross."

Pete laughed. "Brendon Urie! Your worst enemy, Ray!"

Ray scoffed. "He's not my worst enemy. He's, like, 14."

"What's wrong with him?" Gerard asked, furrowing his eyebrows.

"Nothing, he's just irritating. He's my younger brother's friend and he's always over at our house, and he thinks he some kind of paranormal investigator or something," Ray explained. "He thinks our house is haunted. He brings EVP recording devices when he sleeps over, I'm dead fucking serious."

"He'd love my house, it has a graveyard, like, in the backyard," Gerard said.

Pete put his hand on Gerard's arm. "If he ever comes over, you have to tell us what happens. I _live_ for Ray's stories about Brendon," he said seriously.

"He'll show up, tell you about how your fireplace reminds him of a legend where a severed head fell through someone's chimney, think he sees 'orbs' in your attic, launch a ghost tracker app on his phone during dinner, and then leave his bacne medication at your house," Ray snorted. "Once he kept saying he 'smelled death' in our house, but it actually turned out a rat had died in the wall, so I guess that worked out."

"What about the moon thing, Ray? How he said your mom is from the moon?" Bob egged Ray on. Gerard raised an eyebrow. What the hell kind of friend was Mikey making?

"The first time he met my mom, he insisted she was from the moon, I swear to god. Something about a 'luminous glow'," Ray said between bites of his lunch. "It was honestly really creepy. I thought my older brother was gonna knock him out."

"I'm glad my brother is...making friends at least?" Gerard said questioningly.

"Maybe your brother could join the band. Can he play an instrument?" Ray asked.

Otter laughed. "Jesus, Ray, you never stop recruiting."

Gerard half-smiled. Things were going...okay, and 'okay' was about a hundred times better than what he had expected.

For the rest of the first day of school, things went _okay_. Gerard breathed easier than he had in weeks; he felt like he was releasing some kind of tension he had been holding since the day his dad had said they were moving. The disaster he had expected hadn't happened. Far Water wasn't home, but he wasn't _alone_. He wasn't isolated in desert hell, which was kind of ironic because the town itself was. Far Water wasn't the death sentence he thought it would be.

Maybe things, Gerard thought, for once in his life, were going to go his way.

/

Things continued going Gerard's way until about 5 PM, and then he fucked it up. (Honestly, though, things going 100% well for about 6 or 7 straight hours had to be a record for Gerard.)

The new house made Gerard antsy. Something about it just felt wholly unwelcoming. He and Mikey had been sitting on the couch in the living room for an hour, with a VHS tape of _Halloweentown_ playing on the TV to try and get in a Halloween mood, but both of them were only half-listening and even with the familiar movie and the new lightbulbs his dad had brought home, Gerard still felt unwelcome in his own house. It didn't feel like a home, and Gerard, a homebody and basement-dweller, could barely stand to be there.

("It's just because you're not used to the house," Mikey said.

"No, I swear, it gives me bad vibes or some shit," Gerard argued. "Maybe your paranormal investigator friend can explain it." He had told Mikey about Ray's review of Brendon.

Mikey wrinkled his nose. "I'm not sure how I feel about Brendon. He was nice, but he kind of smelled like egg salad.")

Gerard got up from the couch and pulled on his sweatshirt hanging on a hook by the door. "I'm going for a walk to 7/11, I'll be back in like twenty minutes," he said to Mikey. Twenty minutes out of the house and a cherry slurpee could probably make him feel a little better. Mikey grunted in Gerard's general direction in response.

"Get home before Mom does or she'll hit the fucking ceiling," Mikey called after as he started out the door. "She'll think you're trying to hitchhike back to Jersey or something."

"I'll only be gone _twenty minutes_ ," Gerard repeated.

Gerard felt better the second he was out of the house. The air was colder by then than it had been in the day, finally holding some of the familiar October chill he had missed.

The sun was beginning to set, and the whole neighborhood was cast in hazy purple light. The houses cast long, dark shadows, but every house had the lights in their windows on and the jack-o-lanterns on their front porches lit. Jesus, Far Water did not fucking play when it came to looking picturesque.

It was so picturesque that Gerard _actually_ started taking pictures of it on his now thankfully-charged phone. He thought it was the perfect place to base some new sketches for backgrounds off, and by the time he had been in and out of 7/11 and gotten his blessed 99 cent slurpee, he had already taken 20 pictures. He hadn't drawn anything he liked in weeks; this was the exact kind of inspiration he needed, especially if he wanted to pad his portfolio to get it ready by the time he started sending out art school applications.

As he stood outside 7/11 and sipped his drink, he looked over the ravine next to the 7/11 and into the forest. The forest looked, to Gerard, delightfully spooky. In the daylight it hadn't been particularly impressive, but in the pinkish-purple light of sunset, it had taken on a new look. His eyes swept across the ravine between him and the forest; it didn't look like it would be too hard to hop. The "DANGER" sign was probably just to keep trespassers out, or to alert people walking in the dark that the ravine was there.

He could jump the ravine, take a few more pictures in the forest, and still be home within the twenty minute timeframe. The sun wouldn't even have time to set.

/

It turned out that looking for inspiration in the woods had _maybe_ not been the best plan.

Gerard had stayed strictly on the forest's path for a while, but when he saw a particularly photogenic clearing just off the path that the day's end sunlight was streaming into, he figured it wouldn't hurt to venture off and just get a picture there. It turned out the clearing was deeper into the forest than it had appeared from the path though, because after he finished taking his picture and turned around to get back on the path, he couldn't see it anymore.

All the trees looked the same - which direction had he come into the clearing from? The sun was setting quickly, more quickly than he thought it would, and suddenly he _really_ wanted to get out of the forest.

He was only panicking a little when he laid his eyes on what he was sure was the exit of the forest; he swore he could almost see the neon light from the 7/11 through the trees, but when he stumbled out through the part in the trees, he wasn't back in town. He was in an empty desert. He couldn't see civilization for miles.

"Are you fucking _kidding me_?" Gerard said shakily to himself in disbelief. He scrambled in his pocket for his phone; no service, zero bars. _Great._

He was so, so fucked. Forget wardrobe malfunctions, broken wall outlets, whatever the fuck else - _this_ was definitely the worst thing that had happened since he had come to Far Water, and it didn't look like Ray Toro was going to hop out from behind a bush or something and save his ass this time. He figured his best bet was to try and get a signal on his phone and use the GPS to figure out where he was - Jesus, he was turning into his dad - rather than try and trace his steps back through the forest. It was getting dark, and he would have to use his phone's flashlight if he went back in there, which would kill his battery, and if his phone died now he would _really_ be screwed.

He had taken about ten steps into the desert, eyes glued to his phone to see if a signal popped up, when, of course, he _tripped_ on something. (The emptiest desert on planet earth, and he found something to trip over. Nice.) He made an unpleasant honking noise when he hit the ground and coughed in the sand he kicked up, but he seemed mostly okay at first until a searing, sharp pain shot through his leg.

It hurt so much he _screamed_. What the fuck, did he land wrong and break his leg? What had he even tripped over? He felt around frantically, blindly in the sand, searching through teary eyes for something he might have landed on that could've hurt him, a rock or a sharp stick or something, and then he saw what it was: a _snake_. He had tripped on a _snake_ , and it looked like it had _bitten him_.

A snake. A goddamn _snake_. It was like living in a Scooby Doo cartoon or a Goosebumps book, it was that ridiculous. Moving out to some town that no one had ever heard of in the middle of nowhere, getting lost in a desert, and getting bitten by a snake. It was the kind of thing that would either happen only in a shitty movie, or only happen to Gerard.

His heart flew into his throat and he staggered shakily to his feet, trying to ignore the pain in his leg so he could get away from the snake before it tried to bite him again. He wasn't exactly an expert on the reptile species of the southwest, and other than the fact that he was pretty sure it wasn't, like, a boa constrictor, he had no idea what kind of snake it was, or, more importantly, _if it was poisonous,_ but he wasn't going to chance getting bitten again. He had no idea if the snake was dangerous or not, but the fact that his chest felt like it was getting tighter and tighter probably wasn't a great sign.

He looked up and down the road, looking for some sign of people - distant buildings, headlights, an airplane overhead, anything - but there was nothing but empty land and empty sky as far as he could see. It was like he'd crossed over into the Twilight Zone; no people, no cars, no nothing, except for fucking snakes, apparently. What was he supposed to do? He hadn't seen a single person since he'd gone into the forest. No one knew he was out here, wherever exactly _here_ was. He had told Mikey he was going for a walk to 7/11, which was maybe ten minutes from their house at most, not for walk through the forest, over the ravine, and into the great sandy beyond. They had to know he was missing at this point, and his mom was probably on the warpath, but how would they ever figure out how to find him? There was no way.

He was going to die. At seventeen years old. From a snakebite. In some nameless desert, where nobody knew where he was, and nobody would ever find him. Fucking classic.

And he was an idiot. When he died, and when his body got eaten by the coyotes or the wolves or the mountain lions or whatever the fuck else was lurking in the New Mexican desert, it would be his own damn fault. Who the fuck, upon moving to a brand new town that they had never set foot in before, like, a day ago, decides to "look for inspiration" by wandering through some sketchy forest out into the goddamn badlands? Why did he ever think that was a good idea? What the hell was wrong with him?

He tried to take in deep breaths, but it felt like there wasn't enough room in his lungs, so he settled for shallow ones instead. He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter around himself; he couldn't tell whether it had actually gotten cold or not - the sun had already set, and dusk was settling in, so it probably had - but he felt a chill all the way to his bones that couldn't have been from the cold. He wanted to go home. He really wanted to go _home_ , but that was hundreds and hundreds of miles away, so he would settle for their house here, even if everything was still in boxes and half the lights didn't work. Their house here would still have his mother and the same vanilla perfume she always wore and his father and his GPS and Mikey and his flat-ironed bangs, and suddenly the idea that he might never get to see any of those things ever again made his throat close up, and it wasn't from any kind of snake venom this time.

He was freezing and burning up at the same time. The landscape started looking like a painting; every line seemed more intense, and the moon seemed glaringly bright and full. It cast an eerie glow over the desert, and frankly, Gerard probably would've been pretty freaked out even if he wasn't grappling with the idea of possible death by snakebite. Gerard thought he was generally a realistic person, but sometimes in darkness like this, with strange shadows and full moons and unfamiliar environments, he started to believe in things like curses and myths and old folk tales. His whole situation sounded like the beginning of a Navajo legend anyway: getting bitten by a snake while wandering an empty desert on a night with a full moon. In a legend, the next thing that would happen was he would get attacked by _el cadejo_ or something, and considering how his day had gone so far, it wouldn't be that surprising at this point if he did.

It felt like everything was blurring and coming into focus at the same time; his face felt numb and he thought was going to puke and then pass out. His eyelids were drooping for some damn reason, and his leg was _swelling_ where he had been bitten. If this was dying, the afterlife would have be pretty sweet to make up for it. His stomach lurched violently and he stumbled to the ground, kicking up dust that made it even harder to breathe.

He had no idea how long he laid there, crouched in the sand, but when his field of vision was flooded with light, he was pretty sure that it was over, this was it - except for this fucking loud clanking noise. It was so loud he could barely think: _clank, clank, clank_. What the hell, didn't heaven have harps or a chorus of angels or something? What, was he in hell? What could he have possibly done to go to hell? He was thinking of how an eternity of this clanking seemed a little harsh when it stopped as suddenly as it started, and he heard a voice.

"Jesus Christ, what are you _doing_ out here? I think I just spent about, what, two hours looking for you? I'm not great with time, but it was, like, a really long time. I thought I would be too late - last place I would look for you would be in the middle of the fucking desert!" it exclaimed. He had never heard it before, but apparently its owner knew him, and was already annoyed with him. Awesome.

He forced his eyes open. It wasn't an angel, or a demon, or at least he didn't _think_ so, so he was probably still alive, but it didn't look like a normal guy either. He was... _glowing_ , or something, and Gerard could already tell that he was short as fuck even from his current position on the ground. His skin was tinged slightly with blue and covered in tattoos that, even in his literal time of dying, Gerard had to admit were really cool. He looked like a fucking...punk elf or something, and everything about him seemed to emit a bright, warm light that Gerard could practically feel. He was kind of hot, in a weird way, but Gerard figured he probably had a few things he needed to be more concerned about at the moment.

"What the - who are you? Where did you even _come from_?" he stammered between shaky breaths.

The guy - or whatever he was - let out an unexpected laugh. "I'm Frank!" he announced, as though that explained everything.

Gerard was baffled. "What the fuck - Frank _who_?" he wheezed.

"Doesn't matter - take this pendant, okay? Put it on." The elf - Frank, apparently, thrust a necklace at Gerard. It was a leather ribbon with a crimson stone hanging from it that seemed to have the same strange glow that Frank himself did.

Gerard held the necklace in a shaky grasp. "What-" he started to ask when Frank snatched the necklace back and slipped it around Gerard's neck for him.

"There," he said, sounding satisfied. "I'll explain on the way, okay? But now you gotta get up, we really need to get going, Gerard. We only have until midnight, and I'm not really sure what time it is, so we could be even later than I thought. Get up!" Frank urged.

"I _can't_ go anywhere - and wait, how do you know my name?" Gerard stammered. He couldn't believe this. He had to be either dead or dreaming, because there was no way this was actually happening. He was being harassed by some kind of tattooed sprite while dying from a snakebite in a desert. Nothing was real anymore, no rules applied, all bets were off, and this was his life.

"You gotta leave your body behind, we'll come back for it, promise. Come on!" Frank insisted, completely ignoring Gerard's questions and hopping from foot to foot.

" _What_?" Gerard demanded for what felt like the hundredth time in the last few minutes.

Frank's glowing eyes narrowed. "Listen. We've wasted enough time already, and _you_ were the one who wandered out into a desert and got bitten by a fucking snake. You can't die yet, it'll mess everything up. I'll explain on the way, but you have to get up _right now._ "

"I can't!" he argued stubbornly, but then he was standing. He was _freezing,_ and at first everything was blurry, but when his eyes focused, there was Frank, looking delighted.

"See! You did it! That wasn't so hard, now, was it?" Frank chirped, sounding a little smug. He grabbed Gerard's hand, and Gerard almost jumped out of his skin. Frank's body temperature had to be, like, below freezing, because his fingers were so cold that they shocked Gerard when he touched him. He was already pretty sure that, if the blue-tinged skin and ethereal glow were any indication, Frank wasn't human, and now apparently he was also cold-blooded or something. Gerard ran through a list of every mythical creature he could think of in his head - vampires, werewolves, swamp monsters, fairies, goblins, the like - but none of them seemed to match Frank. He didn't seem dangerous; Gerard was surprised by how he didn't find this weird, clearly inhuman being scary, but there was something about Frank that made Gerard believe he could trust him. Weren't creatures like Frank usually scary to humans - the uncanny valley effect or whatever? What _was_ Frank?

"My ride is this way - you were way, way off the road, you know that? No wonder you got lost," Frank said, pulling Gerard along with his icy hands. Gerard turned back to see where Frank said he had been laying and his eyes almost bugged out of his head, because he was _still laying there_. There he was, his body motionless in the sand, his face pale and his eyes shut.

"What- am I _dead_? Did I just die?" he shouted, stopping short and wrenching his hand out of Frank's grasp. His fingers shot to his wrist, searching for a pulse. Nope, _nothing_. Gerard's heart jumped into his throat.

Frank laughed, fucking _laughed_. Gerard was apparently dead and looking at his own corpse, and Frank was laughing. What an asshole. "No! You're...you're in between. Like, between life and death," he said, like it was no big deal, and waved his hand dismissively. "It's fine, we're coming back for it. There's no one out here to bother it anyway, it'll be fine," he repeated, taking Gerard's hand again and starting to pull him away.

"What are you - like, Death? Are you Death?" Gerard asked, anxiously pulling at his hair with his free hand, never taking his eyes off his body on the ground. This was what an out-of-body experience felt like? He still looked and felt completely solid, but at least that explained why he was so cold all of a sudden; it felt like the wind was blowing right through him.

"Me, Death? I fucking wish," Frank snorted. "That would be sick. I mean, I'm not Death, but I know her, and she's really cool. That sounds weird, but trust me."

Gerard probably should have been concerned about other things, like the fact that he was apparently "between life and death", but that piqued his interest. "Death is a woman? Interesting."

"What, you've never heard of that concept?" Frank said, rolling his eyes. "Death has been depicted as a woman in like, a billion things. Even Whoopi Goldberg played Death in a movie one time, I mean, come _on_."

"Are you talking about fucking _Monkeybone_? No one even saw that movie, it doesn't count," Gerard argued, a little surprised to hear that Frank could watch movies at all. Clearly nonhuman creatures could still watch human movies, apparently. He still didn't know what the fuck Frank was, but he wouldn't have thought that some kind of entity that comes to you during the transition between life and death would have time to sit around watching critically panned Whoopi Goldberg movies. Didn't a million people die every day? Frank seriously had to have better things to do.

" _I_ saw it. In my free time. When I wasn't saving lost children from certain death in the desert," Frank winked, still making no moves to explain where they were going.

"Well, _Monkeybone_ was awful; usually bad movies get better with age, because then you can laugh at all the shitty out-of-date effects and stuff, but it just keeps getting worse and worse with every passing year that Whoopi Goldberg loses a little bit of her relevance," Gerard said a little shakily, more to distract himself than to actually argue about Whoopi Goldberg's career. Of course, when he couldn't think of anything else to say, he would talk about movies. Movies were a comforting topic for him.

"Bad movies get better with age? Yeah, okay, keep telling yourself that. I rewatched _Jason X_ a while ago, and it still feels like an insult to my intelligence," Frank snorted. He was into horror movies, Gerard noted. Shitty ones - Friday the 13th was a deeply flawed and overrated series, in Gerard's opinion - but he was into them nonetheless. "I'm more of a _Jason Goes To Hell_ man myself," Frank continued.

" _Jason Goes To Hell_ is worse than _Jason X_! The only one worse than _Jason Goes To Hell_ is _Jason Takes Manhattan_ , and there are few movies in this life worse than _Jason Takes Manhattan._ Friday the 13th is a terrible series in general - they took a fucking jump scare from the end of the first movie, realized that was the only scary part of the entire thing, and tried to base 10 more movies off it _._ That's a recipe for disaster."

Frank laughed. "You know your shit. I like it," he said approvingly. Gerard was a little surprised Frank had actually listened to him; people tended to sort of tune him out when he went off about shit like that, but Frank seemed...genuinely interested. If Frank was a normal guy and not some mysterious, otherworldly entity, Gerard would probably have been really into him. "Anyway," Frank continued, "At least agree with me that _Jason X_ had the worst tagline of the series. 'Evil gets an upgrade'? Did they even try?"

Frank was not only hot and into horror movies; he apparently also liked to have _spirited debates_ about horror movies. Gerard was in big trouble. "Listen. 2001 was a really bad year for cinema."

Frank stopped short, so Gerard did too, cutting off his incoming lecture about the state of new millennium horror films. "There she is!" Frank announced proudly, pointing. "I call her Lucille."

He was pointing at a black...car. Gerard was surprised. He had expected something a little more...otherworldly? A normal car seemed a little plain for an actual harbinger of death. Maybe a hearse would have seemed a little more appropriate?

"Wow, I was expecting like...a broom or something," he said. Frank laughed again. He had such a weird, twinkly cartoon laugh; Gerard had to admit it was pretty cute.

"First you act like Death can't be a woman, then you drag _Jason Goes To Hell_ , and now you're implying that I ride around on a fucking _broomstick_? This is getting a little offensive."

"Sorry? I'm the one dying here. Cut me some slack."

Frank smiled, a little uneasily. "You aren't gonna die," he said in the least reassuring tone Gerard had ever heard. "We're definitely running _late_ , but it's not midnight yet, right? We have time, I think." Frank pulled out something from his pocket and snapped it open.

"Are you using - is that a cell phone? You have a fucking cell phone?" Gerard exclaimed. Apparently the spirit world or wherever Frank was from was just as technologically advanced as the human world - or at least, it was trying to be, but considering Frank's phone looked about ten years out of date, it was probably a little behind.

"The Moon Realm isn't nearly as weird and foreign as you think it is, trust me. I still feel like our phones should be more advanced than yours, though. I shouldn't have to charge it," Frank said and closed his, like, ghostly 2005 Motorola Razr. "I always forget to and it's always dead, so I never really know what time it is. I really should get a watch, but there are spirits around here that can fuck with time, so it makes them kind of useless."

 _The Moon Realm_. That was where Frank was from, apparently. It kind of made sense; it explained Frank's luminescent glow, at least. Gerard was a little alarmed to hear that there were spirits who could mess with time in the Moon Realm; was that a normal part of paranormal lore? If he made it back home alive, he was going to be doing some serious research. So far, he was planning to look into urban legends, deserts, and especially fucking _snakes_. This was truly turning out be a learning experience. Then he remembered something Ray had said earlier: _"The first time Brendon met my mom, he insisted she was from the moon. Something about a 'luminous glow'."_

The _Moon_ Realm. Holy shit. Holy shit. Gerard stopped dead in his tracks. That Brendon kid apparently knew a lot more than Ray or any of his friends had realized. Maybe it had been a coincidence, Gerard thought, but something told him it wasn't. This was a real thing, with lore that apparently could be accessed and studied by a 14-year-old living in the middle of nowhere like Brendon. If Gerard lived, he had to find that kid.

Frank was looking at him a little oddly. "I have my phone - " Gerard began, trying to cover for how he had stopped so suddenly, digging in his pockets for his phone, only to find they were all empty. Apparently only his clothes had come with him on this out-of-body extravaganza and none of his other possessions had. "Uh, never mind, I guess," he backtracked, turning his pockets inside-out.

"Nah, it's fine, I knew you wouldn't have it," Frank shrugged. "You can't bring shit like that into the other Realms, and the time is different here anyway. I can't describe it...hours pass differently here. Days go quick, and nights seem to last forever sometimes." He pulled the car door open.

Frank's car was different than any car Gerard had ever seen. The dashboard was completely empty except for the steering wheel, no dials or buttons at all, and there was only one pedal. This was presumably another Moon Realm relic, but the what hell, how did they drive with only one pedal? Before he could ask, Frank pulled him into the car.

"No seatbelts? Risky," Gerard snorted as he climbed into his seat.

"Our cars don't have them. Trust me, there won't be anything to crash into where we're going," Frank said cryptically. It sounded like something out of a shitty thriller movie, but honestly, so had the entire last hour or so of Gerard's life. He had pretty much accepted that his life had turned into a Goosebumps book - The Night of the Glowing Elf - and he had started to expect shit like that.

He didn't expect it, however, when Frank immediately fucking _floored it_ as soon as they were both in the car. "What the _fuck_?" Gerard exclaimed as he lurched forward, bracing himself against the dashboard.

Frank just laughed his twinkly fairy laugh again. "This is how I always drive."

There was no speedometer or anything to indicate how fast they were actually going, but it was definitely way faster than any normal car could ever go. Gerard had no idea how Frank could even see where he was going; they were going so fast the entire desert just turned into one long blur. From what Gerard could make of it, the road they were on definitely wasn't the one they had driven into town on the day before, and it seemed to go on forever. Frank hadn't been lying when he said there would be nothing to crash into; other than the odd cactus, there seemed to be nothing and no one in this entire part of the desert. How had Gerard even gotten there?

As they continued down the road, Gerard heard a familiar _clanking_ \- _clank, clank, clank_. That was what the noise he had been hearing earlier was! "Why does your car make that noise?" Gerard asked.

"Who fucking knows, honestly. It always did. I think I could probably get it fixed or something, but I've come to kind of like it. When you hear that noise, you know that I'm coming, you know?" Frank replied. Gerard raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything.

They were quiet after that. They sped down the endless road for what felt like a long time. Gerard alternated between staring out the window and staring at Frank, waiting for an explanation of what was going on that seemed like it was never going come at this point. He wished he had his phone, mostly because he wished he could tell his family, who were probably freaking the fuck out, where he was (but he honestly wouldn't be able to tell them much - where the hell _were_ they? How long was this fucking road? How big and empty could this desert possibly be?) but partially because he was really starting to wonder what Mikey would have thought of all this. _take pics of the glowing elf on the dl if u can_ , his texts would probably read. _i want 2 see this._

"Where are we going?" Gerard finally asked, pulling at the ends of his hair.

"The Southern Forest," was all Frank said, eyes locked straight ahead on the road. What the fuck, did this guy ever explain _anything_?

"And...what is that?"

Frank stared at Gerard for a minute. "Sorry I'm being pretty...vague. You looked pretty freaked when I found you, I didn't want to make it worse."

"Well, you said you would explain on the way, is this 'on the way'? I need answers here," Gerard pushed.

Frank snorted. "Wow, okay, pushy," he laughed. "Where do I start...So, basically...you died from that snakebite earlier - that was rattlesnake bite, by the way, and rattlesnakes typically only bite when provoked. Do I even _want_ to know what you were doing?"

"I fell on it, I'm an innocent victim!" Gerard argued. "How do you know it was a rattlesnake, anyway? It wasn't even there by the time you found me - and I thought you said I wasn't dead!"

"Okay, I was _getting to that_ , you didn't let me finish," Frank huffed, but he was smiling. "First, there are only a few kinds of snakes that can kill people in New Mexico, and they're all rattlesnakes except for coral snakes, and it takes a few hours before you feel the effects of a coral snake bite, so it had to be rattlesnake that bit you. Process of elimination."

"You're really up-to-date on the snake knowledge, I see."

"I have to know about shit like that; I come to people when they die; I have to know about all the things that can kill a person. Let me tell you, there's a _lot_ more ways to die than you would think," Frank shook his head. "Anyway, you technically are dead, but you aren't...supposed to be. The whole snakebite thing was never supposed to happen - apparently even the goddamn fates have no idea what you were doing in that desert."

Gerard almost laughed. Confirmed: he was such a mess that even fate itself couldn't predict how he was going to fuck up next. It was honestly poetic.

"If you die now, it'll fuck everything up, so we gotta try and...bring you back, I guess. We only have until midnight, and that's not a lot of time - which, okay, is kind of my fault, because I may have made a _few_ stops while I was looking for you," Frank continued.

"I was dying and you made _pit stops_?" Gerard said in disbelief.

"They were important!" Frank defended himself. "Like, I wasn't sure if you would need your pendant, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry, so I went and got it, and you totally _did_ need the pendant. If I hadn't gotten it, you would definitely be screwed right now. Trust me."

Gerard absentmindedly tugged at the necklace. "What does it do?"

"You need your pendant to be able to travel from one Realm to another; usually people are only in the Moon Realm for a really short time and then they go straight to the Sky Realm - the Sky Realm is, like, heaven, I guess? I wouldn't know, I've never been there," Frank shrugged, an unreadable look flashing over his face. "I wasn't really sure if you would need your pendant because, uh, I've never really done this before? Usually I just bring people through the Moon Realm into the Sky Realm; trying to get someone from the Moon Realm back to the Sun Realm is...a new one for me."

Gerard's eyes widened slightly. His life depended on this guy being able to get him back into his body - or, back into his _Realm_ , apparently - and this was his _first time_ trying to do it. Gerard had never had great luck, but today was on a whole new level of unluckiness. Maybe Mikey was right and Gerard _had_ pissed off some ancient spirit.

Frank must have seen Gerard's expression, because he immediately sputtered out, "Trust me, this is really rare. I only know, like, one person who has ever had to do this. Usually people only die when they're supposed to."

"That's really reassuring."

"It will be _fine_ \- we're almost there, okay? Just hold on for now," Frank reassured.

For a while after that they were silent. Gerard had to stop staring out the window because it was giving him a serious headache - that felt pretty unfair, he should _not_ have been able to get a headache during a fucking out-of-body experience - so he stared at Frank instead. Even now, despite his current situation, he couldn't help but want to draw him; partially because he was really interesting looking, with his tattoos and lip ring and dimples and glowing eyes and shit, but partially because, okay, now that he could get a good look at him, he could see that Frank was really _, really_ cute. Not just "sorta, kinda hot" like Gerard had thought before; no, _really_ hot. Gerard knew it was probably fucked up on multiple levels to think so; he should not have thought some kind of luminous creature from the great beyond was hot, especially not while he was _literally dying,_ but here he was _._

(Another Google search for if he lived: how to flirt with...humanoid creatures. Jesus, he was fucked up.)

After what felt like an eternity of staring at a blur of empty desert, - "This looks like...the desert world in Mario 3," Gerard commented. "I _know_ , right?" Frank enthusiastically replied - Gerard could finally see that they were approaching something in the near distance. They were moving too fast for him to make out specific details, but it as they got closer, he could see that this was the forest, and holy shit, it was huge. The trees had to be the size of literal skyscrapers and it was really, _really_ dark, the kind of dark where you wouldn't be able to see your own hand two inches from your face.

"This is it," Frank said, disengaging the engine. "You know, I've only ever been here once! I mean, it sucks that you're like...in purgatory, but this place is pretty sick. Maybe it will be worth it."

Gerard seriously doubted dying was worth getting to go into some otherworldly forest - which, what the fuck, this is where he was gonna get brought back to life? A forest? Were they gonna do some kind of creepy woodland ritual? - but Frank seemed so hyped about it he couldn't help but smile. "What happens here? Are we gonna meet a witch who lives in a house made of candy or some shit?"

Frank laughed (Jesus, Frank laughed more than anybody Gerard had ever met. Frank was always smiling, and even when he wasn't, his eyes were always all lit up and his voice always sounded light and happy. Gerard almost wanted to be annoyed by it, but it was so cute that he imagined it would impossible for anybody to be irritated by it) and shook his head. "No!" he exclaimed. "The pumpkins are here - it's some...pretty wacky shit, from what I've heard, but it's cool." He hopped out of the car before Gerard could ask what he meant, but since pretty much everything that had happened that night fell under the category of "pretty wacky shit", he wasn't really that surprised.

The forest floor was littered with fall leaves and high above the ground the moon gleamed down, casting eerie light through the branches. Frank said he had only ever been there once, but he seemed to know the forest really well. There was a path, but it often split and turned and wound around trees and Gerard started to wonder idly if they should have been leaving, like, a bread crumb trail or something, because he had no idea how they were ever going to find their way back _out_. As they twisted and turned through the forest, Gerard could smell something on the wind - incense, maybe, and pine needles and gingerbread, old books and perfume and roses and other things that made him think of the past and his childhood and that a forest probably shouldn't smell like. He was almost worried he'd see a younger version of himself peering at him from behind a tree, hidden in the shadows, which he knew was a bizarre and specific way to feel but he couldn't shake it. It felt like the forest existed outside of any kind of timeline, like they could run into Cleopatra or an alien from the future and both would make sense. Frank wasn't wrong - this place _was_ fucking weird.

"Right here!" Frank exclaimed, stopping suddenly and pulling Gerard into a clearing. "Isn't it cool?"

"Holy _shit_ ," Gerard breathed. It was actually creepy as fuck, but it pretty cool too - maybe not cool enough to get bitten by rattlesnake for, sure, but if he _had_ to get bitten by rattlesnake, then this was a pretty sick place to spend the aftermath. The trees surrounded the clearing in a circle, and there were intricately carved jack-o-lanterns resting on all the branches, all lit, all sneering down at them, giving the entire clearing a yellow glow. In the middle of the clearing there was a fire pit with an unlit bonfire. It looked like the kind of place witches would meet to chant and dance around a fire or something. "This is...my aesthetic," Gerard said, his voice approving. If he lived, he was going to draw so much shit. The jack-o-lanterns, the car, _Frank_. The Moon Realm was his new muse.

Frank clapped his hands together. "I knew I liked you for a reason!" he announced; Gerard tried not to smile at him. "Everyone is always telling me how creepy and weird it is here - I love it! I've been waiting to come back for-fucking- _ever_."

The clearing was a little creepy and weird, sure, but frankly, so was the entire Moon Realm, so Gerard wondered what could possibly happen there that would have even the natives spooked. Whatever it was, Frank apparently thought it was the coolest thing that could ever happen, and Gerard figured it couldn't be too bad if little, sweet-looking Frank liked it so much - Jesus, the dude had fucking _neck tattoos_ and still managed to look endearing - or, at least, he did, until Frank whipped a _knife_ out of his jacket pocket.

Okay, Gerard admittedly didn't know Frank very well, and maybe allowing Frank to lead him into the middle of a woods he didn't know his way out of hadn't been a great idea. But he was already dead; he really hadn't had that much to lose at that point, so he hadn't been super concerned for his own safety. Frank couldn't...hurt him, or anything, right? Not if he was already dead? Gerard assumed he probably couldn't, but regardless, watching Frank gleefully pull out a knife was still _really_ fucking creepy.

"Uh?" Gerard stated dumbly, trying to find a way to formulate his question. "What...are ya doing, Frank?"

Frank giggled, turning his knife in the air to watch the light from the jack-o-lanterns reflect off it. Jesus fuck, this guy could be creepy. Frank went from adorable to vaguely terrifying and back in the span of about five seconds; Gerard was going to get whiplash if this kept up. "I'm not going to _hurt_ you, Gee!" Frank reassured, patting Gerard's arm with his free hand. "I just need some of your hair!"

" _What?"_

"I'm not gonna make, like, a voodoo doll or anything," Frank huffed, as though whipping out a knife and asking for some of someone's hair was a totally normal thing to do and he couldn't imagine why Gerard would be weirded out by it. "We have to put it in the fire." He pointed at the fire pit.

"Why? Are we sacrificing it to a demon in some satanic ritual?" Gerard asked defensively, covering his head. "Listen. I don't wanna make deals with fucking Beelzebub here."

"It's not a satanic ritual, I promise you're not, like, selling your soul. I'm...95% sure of it," Frank nodded, looking off in another direction. "It's so your DNA is bound to the realm or something, I don't know." Gerard wondered if Frank's strategy for getting hair from him was to frustrate him until he literally tore it out of his head. If so, Gerard to admit that, at this rate, it would probably work.

After much wheedling, Gerard reluctantly agreed to give Frank some of his hair - "I only need a few strands, _okay_? God," Frank had huffed - as long as it was from the back and not a noticeable amount, because just because his hair was tangled all time and hadn't been washed in, like, a week didn't mean he was up for some impromptu haircut in the middle of the woods, especially when the hair was for some weird ritual that Frank wasn't 100% sure wasn't a deal with the devil. As he watched Frank pull out matches - he carried around a knife _and_ matches, wow, what a guy - to light the fire, he couldn't help but think it was probably a good thing that Frank was lighting the fire and not him, because, considering how his day had been going so far, he would probably, like, set his fucking ghost on fire by accident, if that was possible. Even if it wasn't, if anyone _would_ be able to figure out a way to do it, it would be Gerard.

The fire burned yellow, then blue, then _green_ , and yellow again, angrily crackling and snapping, seeming more and more violent and bright with each passing second. Frank watched it with wide eyes, looking like he was about two seconds away from jumping out of his blue-tinged skin with excitement. "Just wait, just wait!" he chirped. "It's coming!"

" _What_ is?"

"Listen, listen! Do you hear that?"

"Do you hear that?", was, to a horror movie enthusiast like Gerard, not the greatest thing to hear someone say while standing in the middle of a creepy forest, because in the movies it was always followed by threatening footsteps or leaves rustling or some other ominous noise that indicated the protagonists were in trouble, so when Frank said that his first instinct was to peace the fuck out of there, but he fought his instincts and tried to listen closely. "Listening closely" turned out to be easier said than done, because at first all he could hear was the wind and the leaves crunching from Frank excitedly hopping all over them, but after a little while, he _could_ hear something echoing through the forest: _music_.

It started faintly, so quietly Gerard wasn't sure if he was even hearing anything at all, but it slowly started to get louder and louder. His eyes widened. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed, turning in circles to look for its source. "Where is that coming from?"

"You hear it! You hear it!" Frank chirped. "Just wait, it gets even better!"

The song would've sounded at home on a Halloween theme music soundtrack. It was eerie and quiet - it sounded like it was coming from very far away - but oddly cheerful, the kind of thing that would play at the beginning of a Halloween movie as the camera panned over a view of a town in the fall, kids running around in costumes, the wind kicking up leaves, that kind of imagery. Gerard looked around, searching for the source, and then he realized it was coming from the _pumpkins_. They were _singing_. The jack-o-lanterns were apparently _alive_. Gerard almost wanted to laugh. This fucking night, man. This fucking night.

Gerard opened his mouth to say something, but Frank shushed him immediately. "Don't say fucking anything - _listen_."

The pumpkins all sang the same oddly cheerful tune -

_"Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite_

_All are on their rounds tonight_

_In the wan moon's silver ray_

_Thrives their helter-skelter play."_

Gerard squinted at the pumpkins. "That sounds so familiar," he said, a little taken aback.

Frank laughed. "Joel Benton. 19th century author and poet. That poem's pretty famous." He winked. "He was no stranger around here, that's for sure."

"What?"

"Not everyone in this realm necessarily _originated_ here," Frank said, which made literally zero sense. Gerard wasn't really sure what Frank was trying to get at, and almost let the subject drop, but when Frank caught sight of his questioning expression, he said, "Some people come from there and end up here, you know?" His face looked suddenly melancholy in the jack-o-lanterns' light.

Gerard could tell he had touched on an uncomfortable subject for Frank, and was about to change the subject, but luckily the pumpkins did it for him; just a few moments later, their darkly cheerful tune began again, and Frank's face brightened immediately. "Listen! This one's important!" he urged.

_"Find me in boneyard among the spooks and ghouls,_

_I'll be six feet under in my wooden bed,_

_hidden under tree roots and swamp pools._

_Call to me and from my tomb I'll spring;_

_in the full-moon's light, there we'll be -_

_graveyard queen and king."_

This song was...romantic, in a weird, _Corpse Bride_ way, but it also made Gerard's hair stand on end. Frank, on the other hand, looked delighted. "Are you listening? _Really_ listening?" he asked, eyes wide. Gerard assured him he was.

The pumpkins continued:

" _So come find me next time you hear this tune,_

_we'll roll with the fog, we'll bark at the moon,_

_and though now we are parted, have no tears or fright -_

_this is never goodbye, only good night."_

"That's important!" Frank blurted. "That's the part you need to know!"

Gerard, already a little shaken, was taken aback. He was supposed to have been _memorizing_ that shit? "Like...I need to know it by heart?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah," Frank said, like it was obvious. "That's how it works when you die before you're supposed to - you put your hair in the fire as an offering, sing the pumpkins' song back to them, give them a year, and then they bring you back! Not too hard." He swept his eyes over the pumpkins. "I was mostly worried about getting you here in time. We were cutting it _close_ there, man. After midnight it won't work anymore, and you would be stuck here."

Gerard hadn't heard a single thing Frank said after "give them a year." "A year? It's going to take a _year_ to bring me back?" he sputtered.

"No, no. You give them a year off your life. They have to get something out of it - spirits from around here never do anything for anyone unless they get something in return." Frank scoffed a little at the pumpkins. "Isn't that fucked up? That's so fucking selfish."

What the fuck. Frank could not be for real. "I'm honestly not that concerned with Moon Realm ethics or whatever the fuck right now - just one year? Are you sure? There's no, like...fine print on that, right?" Gerard pressed. A year wasn't so much, really, as long as it didn't come with any extra shit like selling his soul to the devil or anything. Frank had seemed pretty trustworthy thus far and Gerard was pretty sure Frank was trying to look out for him, but he wasn't sure he trusted some wacky singing jack-o-lanterns with his life.

"One year, no strings attached. Promise," Frank said, holding his hands up. "I think you're supposed to live to be...uh, I looked it up earlier, I think something like 88? 89? Pretty fucking old, I know that for sure." Wow. For someone with the ability to see when people were going die, Frank definitely didn't think it was a big deal. "One year isn't that much when you're supposed to live that long, right?"

"I...guess not."

"Great!" Frank said, clapping his hands together. Frank looked so excited that Gerard had to stop himself from smiling at him - what the fuck, he was literally shaving a year off his life here, and he was _smiling_. He might have been kind of emo, but he wasn't _that_ emo. "Don't worry if you can't remember the words to the pumpkin song, I can teach you."

Frank sat with his legs crossed on the ground and motioned for Gerard to sit next to him. "Okay, the beginning goes 'find me in boneyard'..."

/ / / / /

_PART II: THIS LAND IS CURSED_

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Gerard had no scars. The chicken pox scar the back of his hand, the one his knee from falling down a flight of stairs at school when he was ten, the one on his left elbow that he got in freshman year the first time some asshole upperclassmen jumped him on the way home from school, all gone. In the faint moonlight streaming in his bedroom window, he examined his body, but nope, nothing. All his scars were gone.

As Frank had explained it, being sent back into your own realm was kind of like being reborn; all Gerard's scars, his freckles, his birthmarks, everything, were erased. Frank had said no one other than Gerard would remember that he had even gone missing for a night; it would be like the whole thing never happened, except for all the missing scars and freckles. Gerard definitely didn't think that sounded too bad - frankly, he probably would rather actually die than have to explain to his mom where he had been, because she had probably been on a fucking warpath when he didn't come home that night - but his body still seemed unsettlingly spotless to him, long expanses of unmarked skin that seemed startlingly pale.

("I've heard that this normally takes away a tan, if the person has one," Frank had said. Then he laughed. "Doesn't look like that will be a problem for you!")

The actual process of being sent back to his own realm felt like a strange, vivid dream; for what felt like hours he and Frank had sat around the bonfire singing the jack-o-lantern's song, but the jack-o-laterns wouldn't sing it back, which is what Frank said they were waiting for.

After a while even Frank was starting to look distraught, and Gerard knew he was definitely in trouble when Frank started coming up with reasons why _maybe_ it wouldn't be so bad if they couldn't get Gerard home and he stayed in the Moon Realm after all, but then Frank's eyes had lit up. "I have an idea!" he said brightly, and dashed out of the forest.

Frank didn't come back for a _long_ time, and Gerard started to wonder if Frank's idea was to just fucking abandon him and claim no responsibility for what happened to him, but then Frank appeared again in the clearing, a bright smile on his face and a guitar hanging from a strap hung around his shoulders.

"This is my baby girl!" Frank announced, gesturing towards the guitar.

"Where the hell did that come from?" Gerard asked.

"I keep her in my trunk!" Frank said, his eyes practically sparkling. If he had been a cartoon character - and frankly, he practically already was - his eyes would have been shaped like hearts. He clearly _really_ loved his guitar. "I thought maybe if I played the pumpkin song, and you sang, then it would work!"

It was like the two-piece band Gerard had never had; Frank played the guitar, and Gerard sang, and if his life hadn't been hanging in the balance and Frank hadn't been some kind of otherworldly being, he would have whipped out his shitty laptop and started recording some demos for a Halloween concept mixtape. This was some pretty good shit.

The pumpkins must have thought so too, because, to Gerard's relief and Frank's delight, they started to sing back. As the pumpkins' music began to fill the air, the wind started to pick up around them, and it started blowing faster and faster through the clearing. Gerard stopped singing for half a second in surprise, but Frank just barked, "Keep going! Keep going!"

The forest's strange scent, incense and gingerbread and roses, suddenly became so strong that Gerard had resist the urge to plug his nose. The wind turned to fog, and eventually Gerard couldn't see Frank, or the jack-o-lanterns, or the bonfire, and the sound of Frank's guitar and the jack-o-laterns' tinkling voices began to fade. Light began to flood his vision, brighter and brighter, until he was squinting to see, and then, over the howling wind, he heard Frank's voice, clear as a bell:

"Catch ya later!" Frank called, and laughed his bright, cheery laugh.

The light got so bright Gerard couldn't see anything, but then suddenly everything was black. His heart was rattling in his chest, and for a second he had no idea where he was, but as his eyes adjusted to the light he realized he was in his bed at home. Well, not _home_ , but Far Water home. He fumbled in the dark, searching for his wrist, and finally breathed when he felt the familiar thump of his pulse. He was alive. Gerard had never been so glad to see that ugly-ass wildebeest wallpaper in his life.

The whole thing had almost felt like a dream, and Gerard probably would've thought he dreamed the whole thing if it wasn't for his missing scars, but Frank's enthusiastic "Catch ya later!" had definitely, definitely been real. It had sounded like Frank was right in Gerard's ear, and hours later, as the sun was finally beginning to peek over the desert and fill Gerard's room with pale morning light, it was still ringing in his head. _Catch ya later, catch ya later._

He noticed something else that confirmed, yeah, he had definitely died and been brought back to life: the crimson pendant was still hanging around his neck. Gerard fingered the stone curiously; apparently, just like movies and things from his realm could go to the Moon Realm, objects from the Moon Realm could come home with him.

He was exhausted, probably because he had spent all night trying to come back a death by snakebite, and he tried to sleep, but he couldn't stop replaying the events of the night, and by the time his alarm - his real alarm, rescued from his still mostly packed boxes - rung, he didn't feel any at all rested. Cool. He had literally died, and he still had to go to school that day.

If anything, school that day couldn't possibly be that bad. The fact that he had friendly acquaintances to sit with in class and at lunch aside, he had literally been bitten by a snake and dead the day before. As long as he made it through today without actually and literally dying, it couldn't be as bad as yesterday. It would be fine. He would go to school and see Ray and Bob and Patrick and Pete and other _normal human beings_ , and not have to see the Moon Realm or Frank the glowing elf ever again, or at least not until he was 80 or however old Frank had said he was going to be when he died for real. It would be _fine_.

Or, at least, Gerard told himself that, but as he trudged to the bathroom to get ready, he couldn't shake a strange, unhappy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had...liked Frank. Frank was cool, and had a cute laugh, and voluntarily debated with Gerard about Friday the 13th, and played guitar, and was still really fucking hot even if he was glow-in-the-dark and practically a midget. He was so, so Gerard's type, other than the whole not being human thing (and, if Gerard was being 100% honest, that wasn't even _that_ big a deal. He wasn't...completely opposed to the idea. Like, he totally would have dated a vampire. Dating Frank wouldn't _really_ be that different.) Gerard had never clicked so instantaneously with anyone, not anyone else he had met so far in Far Water - even if he did have some new almost-friends - and definitely not anyone he had ever met in Belleville. Frank seemed to really like him a lot, too.

Nice. Gerard finally met someone he might have been able to date, and it was some kind of otherworldly munchkin. He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror with a helpless expression on his face. He was gonna _miss_ Frank. What the fuck.

Mikey knocked on the bathroom door. "Are you almost done in there?" he asked through the door. Gerard turned on the water to sound busy and promised to be out in a second.

"You look like hell, Gee - like, I know that's part of your look, but you look even more dead than usual," Mikey said in a blunt voice as Gerard emerged from the bathroom, pointing to the purple half-moons stamped under Gerard's eyes. "Are you okay?"

"I had...a weird dream last night."

/

Gerard's prediction that his second day in Far Water would be normal held up until third block, after lunch. On the way to school, he explained the details of his "dream" to Mikey, leaving out details like exactly what the Moon Realm was called to make sure it really sounded like a dream, but Mikey refused when Gerard asked if he would ask Brendon about it for him. Sure, Brendon probably wouldn't be a huge help, but Gerard was still dead-set on the idea that he knew _something._

"I don't think he would really be that much help," Mikey said. "I noticed he had the Wikihow on 'How to Conduct a Ghost Hunt' bookmarked on his phone yesterday. I don't think he's that credible of a source."

Gerard's second morning at La Puebla was, thankfully, much less eventful than his first and free from both wardrobe malfunctions and bathroom monologues. They talked about rejecting null hypotheses in math and - what the fuck else - the symbolism in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in English, and Ray somehow managed to get an olive stuck up his nose at lunch, but that was about as exciting as it got.

Third block was when Gerard had electives, but the only elective he was taking was Intro to Studio Art which only met three times a week, so on Tuesdays and Fridays he would have a study instead. Despite the directions Pete and Patrick had tried to give him at lunch - Patrick tried to explain, as best he could, how to get to room FE301, Gerard's assigned study hall, from the courtyard, but Pete was trying to teach him a _shortcut_ , and their directions completely conflicted - he was totally lost, and since the bell had already rung at least five minutes before, the hallways were deserted of anyone to ask for directions.

He finally found what he thought was the right place at first, but then he thought that that couldn't possibly be it. The lights were dim, there seemed to be literally no one around, and there were honest-to-god cobwebs in the corners. The hallway he was in was on the bottom floor, part of the basement, which sounded about right because both Pete and Patrick had mentioned going to the bottom of the back stairwell, and the rooms were labelled with F's at the beginning, but all of the room numbers began with FS instead of FE. Would FE be near FS? Gerard had no clue, and the school map, which was basically just a floor plan of the building with _no rooms or hallways actually labelled_ , was really not fucking helping.

Gerard went up and down the hall at least ten times, which was starting to become a reoccurring theme at this school for him, before concluding that FE and FS were, in fact, not in the same hallway and deciding to turn back, but - what the fuck, how did he get out of here again? All the doors looked the same, and he couldn't remember which one went to the stairwell. Hadn't he gone around a corner or something? Where the fuck was the exit? It seemed like every classroom in the hall was empty - which, considering the building was massive and there were barely 150 students, wasn't that surprising - so there was no one around to ask. Cool, great.

The only room that appeared to have anyone in it was one that he kept passing in his pursuit to find an escape from the FS wing where he could clearly hear a piano being played, probably a music classroom or practice room or something. He didn't want to bother the person in there because it sounded like they were practicing something; they kept playing the same song over and over, and it sounded strangely familiar to Gerard, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

Frankly, if he was being honest, part of the reason he didn't want to ask whoever was in there for directions was also because it was kind of creepy. Here he was, wandering up and down this deserted hallway in the basement of his 100-plus-year-old school, and the only other person down there was some unknown playing the same, weirdly familiar piano tune over and over again. It was unsettling. In a horror movie, he would go in the classroom to find _no one there_ , and later learn that wing of the school had _burned down 30 years ago_.

But there was no one else down there, and after pacing the hall about 20 times with no luck at being able to figure out how to get back the way he came, Gerard decided to just man up and ask whoever was in there how to get out. His life might have been fucking ridiculous, but it wasn't a horror movie, and asking for help finding his study hall wasn't going to kill him. As long as there weren't any _snakes_ in there, he would _probably_ be fine.

When he opened the door to the classroom, there was a girl with long, pale blond hair turned away from him at the piano. It looked like it _was_ music classroom after all, but half the lights were off and Gerard still thought the whole thing was off. She was sitting in a dim room, _alone_ , no teacher, no other students around, playing one song in an endless loop. Even if she was just a normal kid, that was still fucking weird.

She didn't notice him right away, but as soon as Gerard walked in the heavy wooden door slammed behind him, and she stopped playing and whipped around and narrowed her eyes. "You broke my concentration!" she said sharply. Once he got a good look at her, he couldn't help but notice she seemed to...glow, just slightly. He hoped half-heartedly it was the lighting.

"Uh, sorry?" Gerard said, caught off guard. "I was just - I'm new, and uh, I got lost, and I was wondering if you could tell me, uh...where the stairwell is?" He sounded dumb even to himself, and the girl looked appropriately unimpressed, but he really didn't care as long she could tell him how to get out this creepy fucking sub-basement or whatever the hell it was.

She laughed in a way that clearly indicated she was laughing _at_ him, not with him. "Well, maybe I can help you," she said. "If you help me with something first."

"Uh, okay?"

"Listen to this. I've been practicing." She turned around and played - what else - the same song she had been playing the whole time. At least now Gerard knew why she was only playing one song; she was just very, _very_ diligently practicing.

When she finished, she turned around and stared at him pointedly, clearly waiting for some kind of reaction. "That was, uh, really good," Gerard said quickly. "I wish I could play like that."

She didn't seem satisfied with that response. "Good, huh?" she asked, pointing her nose in the air. "If it was so good, then how come you didn't _dance_?"

What the _fuck_. "What?"

"Do you even _know_ what I played?" she asked, sounding personally offended for some reason that Gerard couldn't even begin to decode. "Verdi? Macbeth? The witches' chorus? _Che faceste, dite su_? Don't you know anything about that?"

Macbeth. She had wanted him to _dance_ to a song from fucking _Macbeth_. Gerard's life literally could not get more weird. Mercury had to be in retrograde or some shit. "Uh, sure. I've read Macbeth."

"No!" She said, slamming her hands down on the piano and eliciting an unpleasant sound from the clashing keys. The lights above flickered; Gerard's eyes widened. "No one ever appreciates my music the way they _should_." With a sniff, she turned back to her piano. "I don't need people like you anyway. Reed always dances for me."

"Who?" Jesus Christ, all Gerard had wanted was some directions, not melodramatics from some angst-ridden piano player. "You know, never mind, I'll just find the stairs myself. Uh, thanks anyway," he said, turning to leave.

"I wouldn't leave if I was you. Not yet. Not while Allegra is still mad at you," said a new voice. Gerard whipped around, and there was a guy sitting in a posture chair literally _right next to him_. Had he been there the whole time? How had Gerard even missed him?

"Come dance for me, Reed. Show this kid how my music is meant to be appreciated," said the girl - Allegra - without turning away from her piano. _Allegra and Reed_. Music names. Gerard shook his head. Real fucking funny.

She started playing and Reed, as ordered, started dancing. Reed's dance was some kind of weird tap dancing with swinging arms and legs, and for some unknown reason, his joints kept cracking really, really loudly. It was pretty much the most unsettling thing Gerard had ever seen. He wasn't sure how he really expected this guy to dance to Verdi's Macbeth, but that was...definitely not it.

"I'm just gonna...go..." Gerard said cautiously, heading slowly towards to door.

"Not yet!" Allegra boomed. The lights started flickering again. Gerard literally _jumped_ in surprise. This was officially the creepiest thing he had ever experienced, and he was ready to fucking bounce.

"You can't go yet!" Reed echoed Allegra. Before Gerard could say anything, Reed whirled his arm in a particularly enthusiastic motion, and to Gerard's horror, it made a horrible noise and _snapped off._

Reed's arm was on the ground. Allegra was still playing. The lights were flickering. Gerard was officially in panic mode. He practically sprinted to the door, but when he tried to open it, it wouldn't budge. "Are you fucking _kidding me_ ," he panted to himself, his heart beating wildly against his chest.

Allegra started to play faster, and more of Reed's body parts started falling off right before Gerard's eyes. First some of his remaining fingers, then his other arm, then the bottom part of his left leg. He fell down, but kept dancing as best he could with what was left. Each one fell off with the same terrible _crack, crack, crack_. Gerard was shaking the door handle wildly. He was gonna fucking die, _again_. He was gonna die in this room with these fucking ghosts or whatever the hell they were. This was gonna be how it ended for real. Everything in Far Water was out to fucking get him.

"What's the matter?" Reed called to him, still dancing, still falling apart, joints still cracking. "Don't you like Allegra's music?"

Suddenly the door handle flew out of Gerard's grasp. "What are you _doing_ down here, kid?"

There, in the doorway, was a school janitor. He was holding a bucket with a mop in it, and looked pissed. "This hallway is _closed_."

Well, at least that explained why the only people down there were some kind of ghostly entities. "Aren't you seeing this?" Gerard asked frantically, gesturing towards the music room from hell.

"Seeing _what_?"

Gerard turned back to classroom. It was _empty_.

He was, 100%, confirmed, living in a fucking horror movie. Things just kept getting better.

/

"What were you doing in the south F wing anyway?" Bob asked, not moving his head from its permanent position on the desk. "It's closed."

"Closed for what?" Gerard exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air. "For fucking ghosts?"

"For mold," Ray replied without looking up from the article they were supposed to be analyzing. "It's part of the basement and it got flooded last year. Though, honestly, I really wouldn't be surprised if this school was haunted. This building is from, like, the 1910s."

"They looked solid, man. I thought they were real people, just really, really weird ones up until he started losing body parts and they disappeared into thin air," Gerard shook his head, like he was trying to physically dispel the memories.

He was in history with Ray and Bob - if going to a school with under 200 students had any perks, it was having all his classes with at least a few of his almost-friends, except of course, his fucking study hall - and explaining how he almost died in the sub-basement during third block to see if maybe they had also had paranormal near-death experiences at school. Neither of them had. Ray had lived in Far Water his entire life and nothing like this had ever happened to him, meanwhile Gerard had lived there three days total and couldn't take ten steps without risking life and limb. Figured.

"Nothing ever happened to me here, but my whole family thought my house in Chicago was haunted," Bob said. "Or, like, at least, we all thought the attic was. One part of it was, like, extremely fucking cold, but just that one part, and sometimes if you were outside and looked at the window in the attic you would see, like, an old man up there. It was freaky." He thought for a minute. "But I mean, I never saw the old guy's arms and legs and shit fall off, so it was probably better than whatever the fuck just happened to you."

"You know, that band room was closed way before the south F wing got flooded," Ray said, looking up from the article for the first time and tapping his chin. "Remember that?" he asked Bob. "Halfway through freshman year they just decided to move the whole band upstairs out of nowhere. Maybe it _was_ because of ghosts."

"Has anyone else ever seen anything?" Gerard asked. "Like, in that band room?"

Ray shrugged. "I mean, maybe, but I've never heard about it." He laughed a little. "In freshman year, near Halloween, we watched this movie about living skeletons or something, and the next day Pete had a heart attack because he thought a music stand he saw out of the corner of his eye in there was one of them, but that's about it."

So it was just Gerard experiencing this weird shit. Great.

/

That night it rained, and the ceiling in Gerard's room started leaking. He got up to get a bucket to catch the drips, but the house was still mostly packed - so far only the living room was fully unpacked, and Gerard's mother had somehow managed to make it look almost identical to the living room back home, which was equal parts comforting and unsettling - so he decided to just get a pot from the kitchen and make it work with that.

A glass sliding door to the backyard took up one of the walls in the kitchen, and the rain was so heavy that Gerard could barely see past the back porch; everything beyond that was a blur of dark blue and black. The kitchen was pitch black because the moon was covered by the clouds, so there was no light coming in from the outside, but Gerard didn't feel like fumbling around trying to find the light switch in the dark - he still wasn't familiar enough with the house to be able to find it in the dark without practically groping the wall - so he just turned on his phone's flashlight and started looking through the one billion and one fucking cabinets this house had. The kitchen was too different and too much bigger from their old one for his mom to turn it into a replica of their Jersey kitchen, and he had no idea where anything was, but he was sure at least one big pot had to have been unpacked because his mom had made her famous mac and cheese for dinner the first night they were there.

When he pulled his head out of the fifth empty cabinet, he noticed some kind of...bright light coming in from the glass door. At first he thought it was his flashlight reflecting back at him, but the flashlight was pointed directly into the cabinet, so there was no way that could be it.

"What the fuck…" He went up to the door and squinted, trying to see through the fucking torrential downpour hitting the glass. It was too big to be a headlight, and it was directly in the middle of the cemetery, so that pretty much ruled out a car. It almost looked like a person, but who would be out at, like, 1 in the morning on a Tuesday night in the rain?

Gerard hesitantly clicked the sliding door's lock open. There was a lot of scary shit in places like this, out in the west where nobody lived, aliens and freaky desert animals and the ghosts of natives murdered during colonial times still lingering, and after the shit that had happened the past two days, getting abducted by a UFO wouldn't even be that much of a stretch, but there was something about the light that made Gerard feel like he had to investigate it.

The back porch was, thankfully, covered by an awning, so Gerard wasn't getting soaked in the rain. He stuck close to the house, and narrowed his eyes to try and get a better look at the light. It was about 100 yards away and still difficult to see through the rain, but it was definitely a humanoid shape. He was about to dash back into the house and deadbolt the door behind him because it occurred to him that a _glowing_ human-shaped _thing_ in a _cemetery_ at _night_ probably wasn't something he wanted to fuck with, when the rain let up for a just a moment, allowing him to see more clearly and realize that he _recognized_ the thing. "No fucking way."

There, clear as day, sitting on a headstone, in all his luminescent glory, was _Frank_.

 _Frank,_ who Gerard had just been sad about probably not seeing again for another, like, 70 years. He had to be there for a _reason._ Gerard raced back into the house for a second to grab a sweatshirt to at least _sort of_ protect him from the rain and threw it hastily over his pajamas before darting back outside. Frank's back was to him, but when he got close enough, Frank seemed to perk up immediately and turned around, as though his name had been called. In the total darkness, with no moon to illuminate the area around him, Frank was as bright as a fucking light bulb, and once he realized Gerard was approaching him, he smiled and seemed to get even brighter. Gerard's sweatshirt was already half-soaked through by the time he reached Frank, but Frank appeared bone-dry, like the rain was going right through him. Hell, it probably was.

"Hi, Gee!" Frank chirped, hopping off the headstone. He looked ridiculously happy to see Gerard, and despite the rain and the fact that he was standing in the middle of a cemetery in the dead of night, Gerard felt himself smiling back at Frank. "I knew you'd find me out here."

"What are you doing here, Frank?" Gerard asked, pulling his hood higher up on his head to keep the rain off. He laughed a little. "Don't you have some people to bring to the afterlife, or something?"

Frank laughed his weird, twinkly laugh - Jesus, he was _cute_ \- and shook his head. "No, not really. Don't get me wrong, a _lot_ of fucking people die every day, it's just that there are so many of us that bring them over that we don't get assignments that often." Frank rolled his eyes. "You were my first in, like, forever. Anyway, since you were the first person I ever sent back to the Sun Realm, I wanted to check on you and see how you're doing. How did your first day back from the dead go?"

Gerard thought for a minute. "...Interestingly. I think I met some ghosts or something at school today, but I mean, other than that, not bad," he replied.

Frank cocked his head. "There's no such thing as ghosts - trust me, I would know. What did you see?"

"It was in this abandoned music classroom. I got, uh, lost, and went in the wrong room, and there was this girl playing piano while this guy danced for her and, like, _literally_ fell apart, and then they disappeared into thin air. It was fucking freaky," Gerard recalled. It was kind of ironic to be calling anything "fucking freaky" when he was literally discussing it in a graveyard with some kind of otherworldly spirit - Gerard _still_ wasn't 100% sure what exactly Frank was, although apparently he couldn't be a ghost because those didn't exist - but Frank was different. Frank was, as far as Gerard knew, on his side.

Frank's eyes went comically wide. "Allegra and Reed?" he squeaked. His reedy voice seemed to blow with the wind. "You met _Allegra and Reed?_ "

"Uh, yeah?"

"Holy shit. That is not good."

"Thanks for the reassurance."

Frank shook his head. "Well, I mean, I guess it's okay for you. It's not so good for _us_ ," he said, gesturing towards himself on "us". "Allegra and Reed are Moon Realm spirits - and fucking annoying ones at that - and they are _not_ supposed to interact with people from the Sun Realm. Like, ever. You guys...aren't really supposed to know about this shit. For the most part, you guys don't find out until you die, and then you're dead so you can't really tell anyone." Frank smiled a little. "You're...a special case. What happened to you has happened to like, three people _ever_. There's like a .0000001% chance of it happening." The look in Frank's eyes went strangely soft; Gerard tried not to notice. "Everyone has been asking me about you."

Cool. There was almost no chance at all of being able to fuck up and die before you're supposed to, and Gerard still pulled it off. "Who's everyone?"

"It's not just me over there!" Frank exclaimed. "There's a lot of spirits over there; most of them, like Allegra and Reed, originated there in the first place. The Moon Realm is like...between, between life and death, the Sun Realm and the Sky Realm, so if you're from there you can travel to both because you...have characteristics of both, I guess? But if you go to the Sun Realm you are _not_ supposed to talk to humans. That shit is not okay." Frank's eyes narrowed at the thought.

Gerard raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you breaking that rule right now?"

Frank rolled his eyes, like the weird fucking Moon Realm code of conduct rules should have obvious to Gerard. "First of all, I'm not a normal spirit, I'm a ferrier. Think, like, the ferrier of the River Styx. I bring people from life to death, that's my job. I _have_ to talk to humans." A _ferrier_ , that was what Frank was called. "Second, I'm...not from the Moon Realm. I didn't originate there. It's a...long story." A strange look passed over Frank's face, the same one from when he had been talking about his past the day before, but it was gone as soon as it appeared. He was clearly hiding something, but Gerard couldn't figure out what exactly that was, and something about Frank's reaction to it made him reluctant to ask.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a minute, but then Frank's face brightened again. "Anyway, that's why I've never been to the Sky Realm. I literally can't go there. Moon Realm spirits can, but they tend to hang out either in the Moon Realm or in the Sun Realm. The Sky Realm is pretty fucking boring, or so I've heard. Did Allegra and Reed talk to anyone else?"

"No - well, I mean, _maybe_ , but I think they only talked to me," Gerard rambled. "That whole wing of the school was closed, apparently? I told you, I got lost, _okay_ ," he said when Frank gave him an amused look, "and no one else was down there except me. A janitor showed up but they disappeared the second he opened the door; that's why I thought they were ghosts."

"They...only talked to you? They didn't talk to the janitor? That's weird. Allegra and Reed are, like, the biggest attention whores you will ever meet," Frank said seriously. "I'm not surprised they broke the rules, I'm just surprised they didn't take the opportunity to fuck with as many humans as possible."

Gerard made a terrible snorting laugh noise. "I guess I really _am_ special."

Frank smiled, but his eyes looked worried. "I hope I didn't mess up when I brought you back or anything...maybe I forgot a step? Maybe I accidentally left some part of you tied to the Moon Realm and they could tell?" He sounded nervous. It wasn't very reassuring.

"Can that _happen_?" Gerard asked.

"I don't know! Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I mean, what are the odds? You get brought back from the Moon Realm and the next day run into Allegra and Reed," Frank babbled. "There has to be some kind of connection, unless - I mean, has this kind of stuff been happening to you your whole life? Prone to paranormal experiences? There are some people that just have like...a connection."

Gerard shook his head. "No. Nothing has ever happened to me before this week. Shouldn't you know about this stuff? If you're a ferrier or whatever?"

Frank furrowed his eyebrows. "I told you, bringing someone back from an untimely death is really rare, it's literally only happened three times, and the same ferrier did the the other two. No one really knows that much about what the side effects of it or whatever are." Frank's eyes lit up. "Wait - we can ask Lindsey! She did the other two, maybe she knows!"

"Who's Lindsey?"

"She's another ferrier, but she's been one way, way longer than I have, and she just knows way more about in this area than me. Maybe she knows," Frank said. "Let's go ask her!"

" _Let's_?" Gerard asked, eyes wide. "Like, go together? I can't, I'm not dead at the moment."

Frank laughed. "You don't have to be _dead_ to go to the Moon Realm. If a spirit like me is with you, you can cross over any time - or, I mean, so I'm told. I haven't spent a lot of time since I've been a ferrier in the Sun Realm." He shrugged. "As long as you're back in the Sun Realm by sunrise I'm pretty sure it's fine. Dead people aren't supposed to be able to cross back into the Sun Realm, though, and that's why it was such a big fucking to-do to get you back over here."

Gerard hesitated for about half a second, because with all the weird paranormal shit going on in his life crossing into the Moon Realm again would probably only make things worse, and his mom would _literally lose her mind_ if he wasn't back by morning and she found his bed empty, but then Frank said, "Well, I mean, you don't have to come, but I would really like it if you did," while looking at Gerard with _big fucking puppy-dog eyes_ , and he was gone. He was gonna go. He couldn't say no.

"Okay," he said, and Frank immediately broke into such a huge smile that Gerard could see all of his crooked teeth - and what the fuck, even _those_ were cute. When Frank smiled he smiled with his whole face; his eyes would crinkle and light up and he looked so fucking happy that Gerard couldn't even regret his decision to cross back into the Moon Realm and mess with some paranormal shit or whatever. No one else ever looked that happy to see Gerard.

"Great!" Frank said brightly and clapped his hands together - it seemed like Frank did just about _everything_ brightly. "Okay, the first thing is Lindsey runs this place called the Night Kitchen; it's like...a marketplace for witches and the like to buy ingredients for spells," Frank said. A marketplace for witches to buy fucking magic ingredients for their spells. Of course. Gerard really shouldn't have expected anything less. "Lindsey's not the usual Moon Realm asshole who will only help you if you do something for her, she's awesome, but I still like to bring her things for her market when she helps me out just as, like, compensation, because I need help...a lot." Frank shrugged. "I'm...not that great at this whole ferrier thing?"

Gerard tried to keep from laughing. "Remind me again how you got this job?"

Frank playfully shoved his shoulder. "Shut up, you would be so fucked right now without me. You would be dead in the desert somewhere. You really should be _thanking me_."

"You might have turned me into some kind of death-magnet, so I'll hold off on the thanks until we sort this shit out."

Frank smiled. "Honestly, I'm glad you fucked up and gotten bitten by a snake. I mean - that part was bad, but I wouldn't have gotten to meet you for another, like, seventy years." He shrugged. "I like you a lot."

Gerard practically felt his heart stop in his chest. _Jesus_ , Frank didn't have any trouble expressing his emotions. It would take Gerard years to tell someone, even in a platonic manner, "I like you a lot," but apparently Frank could bust out with that shit in one day. Gerard would have assumed Frank was just saying it to be nice, but he looked so earnest and sincere that Gerard had to believe him. It made his hands sweat.

Frank had to have meant it in just a friendly way, he had to have, but regardless Gerard was so, so fucked. He could not have a fucking crush on a self-proclaimed _spirit_ from another realm.

He was silent for a long moment, a little too long, to the point that Frank cocked his head in confusion at the sudden radio-silence. "I, uh, thanks?" Gerard said, cringing as soon as the words left his mouth. Wow, no wonder he had never had friends before, he didn't even know how to interact with others like a normal human being.

Frank just stared at him with the same confused expression on his face, probably already regretting saying anything. "You're welcome?"

Nice, Gerard was so awkward he was even weirding out a fucking spectral entity with his lack of social skills. "So, uh, what do you want to bring Lindsey?" he asked quickly, changing the subject to diffuse the situation.

Frank smiled again and Gerard's heart started to slow down from its rate of approximately one billion beats per minute. "I was thinking we could bring her something, like, human, the kind of thing that's harder to get in the Moon Realm. Like, you can get angel breath and troll blood and shit like that really easy, but good luck finding fucking cumin," he said.

Gerard smiled back at him. "I think cumin can be arranged."

/

It turned Gerard actually didn't have any cumin, but there was an unopened bottle of paprika in the pantry he was certain his mother would never miss - what the fuck was she making with _paprika_ , honestly - and that seemed to satisfy Frank.

Umbrella in tow, although Frank insisted they wouldn't need it, they walked to the edge of the forest. Gerard had never seen this part before; the forest bordered an entire side of the town, and this part was nowhere near the 7/11. "So, right here," Frank said, pointing at the entrance to the forest, "if you're just...you know, you, a human, alone, and you walk through here nothing happens. You just go where the forest goes, I guess. But!" He clapped and gestured to himself. "If you go through here with someone from the Moon Realm, you'll cross over! It's called a portal, there are lots of them all over the world. This is just the nearest one."

"Seriously?" Gerard asked. How the fuck did no one know about this? This was like...Harry Potter level, some kind of Platform 9 and 3/4ths shit. "How does that even work?"

"It's just does," Frank shrugged unhelpfully. "But it only works if we're 'connected'," he rolled his eyes and put air quotes around the word _connected_ , "so you gotta hold my hand." He took Gerard's hand, and it felt just as freezing as it had the night before, but Gerard was pretty sure his hands were fucking sweating like it was the end of the world anyway, even though they were wet from the rain in the first place. Frank's hands were _tiny_ and Gerard could not deal; everything about Frank was practically angelic. Big round eyes with long eyelashes, the kind of face that look like it belonged to a cherub painted by an artist in the 15th century, _an ethereal fucking glow_. The fact that he was also practically miniature was pretty much just the icing on the cake.

"Okay, close your eyes!" Frank said as they were about to step into the forest.

"Do I...have to?" Gerard asked, closing his eyes anyway. This was a great combo: pouring rain, one in the morning, closed eyes, about to cross into another realm to investigate why he was possibly being targeted by otherworldly entities, and a stomach full of what were probably less like butterflies and more like fucking wildebeest because he had a weird crush on his spirit companion. His life could not have been more of a joke, honestly.

"No, not really," Frank giggled. Jesus, Frank's voice was somehow even more distracting when Gerard couldn't see him. A factoid from somewhere about how you can hear better when your eyes are closed or something floated into Gerard's mind. "I just want it to be a surprise."

A surprise. It was somehow the cutest thing Gerard had ever heard. He rolled his eyes without even opening them, but he was mostly rolling them at himself. Literally everything Frank did was endearing, and it was getting to be too much. Gerard wasn't made to deal with this. "What's the surprise? Haven't I already been there?"

"Going to the Moon Realm of your own volition and going because you died are two totally different experiences, trust me," Frank promised. He was leading Gerard into the forest, and Gerard definitely knew they'd crossed over when suddenly every external noise silenced. The rain stopped pouring down, the leaves under their feet stopped crunching. All he could hear were their footsteps and his own breathing. It was unsettling, in a way.

"Ok, open!" Frank announced. Gerard opened his eyes and the forest...was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. It was clearly the same forest, but everything in it suddenly seemed to have some kind of magical quality. Fog had rolled in and hung in air around them, and Gerard could smell that same weird scent from the day before, the gingerbread and incense and roses smell. The trees seemed to be impossibly tall, arching against the sky like the vaulting supports of a cathedral, and the sky itself looked like some kind of map of the constellations; Gerard had never seen so many stars at one time in his entire life. Most noticeably, though, was the fact that instead of leaves on the trees there were...some kind of glowing, heart-shaped things. They cast the entire forest in a strange, violet light, and they seemed to be swaying slightly, like a snake being charmed out of a basket. First trees with singing jack-o-lanterns, and now ones with some weird incandescent heart things. Gerard had learned two things: first, Moon Realm plant life was really something, and second, apparently everything there had luminescent properties.

"What are they?" Gerard asked, wide-eyes and Frank giggled and smiled with all his teeth. The heart-things' light made Frank seem to glow violet too, especially in his eyes, and he looked even more non-human than he usually did. Sure, he always looked a little off, a little Uncanny Valley, a little _something_ that made it obvious he wasn't a normal person, but something about smiling like the fucking Cheshire Cat, surrounded by fog, in the lilac light of some kind of bizarre heart-shaped things and the starlight beaming down from the single least-polluted sky in existence made him seem extra spectral. Frank had said that ghosts weren't real, but the only word Gerard could think of to describe him in that moment was _ghostly_.

"They're - hmm, how do I describe this? They're, like, physical manifestations of love, or something like that," Frank explained, sounding about as unsure when it came to Moon Realm lore as he usually did. Physical manifestations of _love_ ; Gerard wondered for a second if Frank was onto him or something and was about to expose him for perving a on fucking incorporeal entity. It would be kind of like having an unrequited crush at school find out he liked them and get weirded out by it, but instead of being able to avoid eye contact with them in the hallway and forget the whole thing happened, Gerard would have the fact that he'd have to see Frank again to cross over to the Sky Realm after he died someday hanging over his head for the rest of his goddamn life. If anyone could figure out how to create awkward situations that extended into the fucking afterlife, of course it would be Gerard. "Think, like, if Cupid was real, these are what he'd be shooting people with."

Frank didn't wink, or smirk, or look disgusted, make any move that indicated that he was onto Gerard, so he figured he was probably safe. "It doesn't even...look real. The forest, I mean. I can't believe this is, like, an actual fucking place," Gerard replied, completely ignoring the _cupid_ part of the statement.

"I thought the same thing the first time I saw it!" Frank chirped. "The Night Kitchen is through this part of the forest, so I like to stop and just..look at this place for a while. It's really in a league of its own, huh?"

"Definitely."

/

The Night Kitchen was hidden deep in the forest, and Gerard wondered how Frank even remembered how to find it. Gerard, admittedly, had an extremely poor sense of direction - he had managed to get lost in a place like Far Water, the world's smallest town, literally a day before, for fuck's sake - but he lost track of where they were within about two minutes of starting the trek towards the Night Kitchen. They had been out of the part with the hearts for a while by then, but everything was starting to look the same to Gerard. "Are you sure we're going the right way?"

Frank scoffed like it was a ridiculous question. "I know how to find the Night Kitchen. I just have to listen for Mutt snoring," he said, like that somehow explained everything. Gerard raised an eyebrow. "Mutt is Lindsey's dog," Frank clarified. "He wakes up, like, once a decade, I think? Like, literally once a decade, I don't mean that in a facetious way. I told you before, I'm shit when it comes to time, but I think that's right. Most of the time he just sleeps and snores. When I hear him, then I know I'm almost there."

Gerard couldn't decide if the craziest part of this onslaught of new info was the dog that slept for ten years at a time or the fact that Frank used the dog's fucking _snores_ as a system of navigation. If his dad was there, he would have been introducing Frank to the joys of GPS that didn't depend on the _snores of animals_ right about then. Gerard hadn't heard anything other than their footsteps and occasional weird ominous giggles that Frank had said were just from "forest sprites" hidden among the trees (even though the idea of unseen pixie things lurking around didn't make it any less creepy to Gerard), and definitely not a snoring dog, but almost as soon as Frank said that he did start to hear something. It didn't sound like _snoring_ , exactly, more like a series of guttural grunts, but based on the fact that it kept getting louder and louder as they continued through the forest, Gerard figured that had to be it.

Frank stopped in front of what looked like a thicket of thorny vines between two trees and just straight-up pulled them apart with his bare hands. Gerard winced. "What the fuck, doesn't that hurt? Those have thorns!"

Frank laughed, even though Gerard could clearly see the thorns digging into his skin. This guy had to be one hell of a masochist. "Nope! It doesn't feel like anything. It won't hurt you; come on, follow me." He disappeared into the vines.

Traipsing through thorns might not have hurt Frank, but Gerard was still pretty convinced he was about to get forever trapped in splinter hell when he unenthusiastically followed Frank through the vines. Frank was right though; they _didn't_ feel like anything. It didn't feel like he was in the vines at all; it just felt like he was passing straight through them, like a ghost through a wall. Gerard was a little unsettled by it, but by that point he had pretty much just accepted that the Moon Realm was a weird place and there was point in questioning it. If even Frank, who lived there, didn't seem have a solid grasp on why things were the way they were in the Moon Realm, then Gerard really didn't stand a chance at getting it. He was just gonna have to accept that apparently he could pass through solid objects and move on.

When they got out of the vines they were in a tiny clearing. Lindsey, whoever she was, was nowhere in sight, and Gerard could hear the dog snoring but couldn't see the dog anywhere. It seemed to be surrounded by fairy lights, but when Gerard looked closer he realized they were actually what appeared to be _real_ _fairies_. They were tiny, even tinier than Frank - quite the impressive feat - and, of course, glowing. Gerard could probably have fit three or four of them in the palm of his hand. In the middle of the clearing there was a wooden hutch-type thing with wheels. It looked a little like a fruit stand or something, but instead of fruit, the shelves were lined with delicate bottles of swirling, metallic-looking liquid and jars full of fucking _bones_. It had everything Gerard could possibly imagine a witch would need for their spells; there were potions and feathers and skulls - _skulls_ \- and god knows what else. He kind of wondered why Lindsey would even _want_ something as plain as paprika for her shop when she had what appeared to be _legitimate angel wings_ , which he was pretty sure you couldn't get at the grocery store for a dollar fifty.

"Frank!" exclaimed a dozen of the fairies, and they flew over and circled around him. Gerard took a step back in surprise, but he had to admit that Frank, who probably could pass as part-pixie himself, looked pretty at home in a swarm of fairies.

"Did you go see him?" one asked. Its voice was high and thin and seemed to ring in Gerard's ears.

"He's right here! I brought him!" Frank exclaimed, gesturing to Gerard. Gerard felt his ears turn pink; the fairy had been asking about _him_. Frank had been talking about _him_ with his little spectral friends.

Which, okay, didn't really mean anything. Frank had said that "everyone" had been asking about him because a human dying before they were supposed to was rare and all that shit; that was all it meant. Gerard tried not to wonder what Frank had said about him.

The fairies looked over at Gerard like they had just noticed he was there. One flew over directly in front of Gerard's nose; his eyes crossed trying to look at it. He wondered if taking a step back or asking this pixie thing to maybe back up a little further than, like, a fucking inch from his face would violate some kind Moon Realm code of etiquette. "This is your Gerard?" it squeaked, speaking to Frank like Gerard wasn't even there. "He doesn't look like how I pictured him." It sounded disappointed.

 _Your_ Gerard. He felt his face turn some kind of nuclear shade of red. "I'm not-" he sputtered, starting to argue that he wasn't Frank's anything, but another fairy cut him off.

"I like him," it argued. "Oh, you were right, Frankie, he _is_ cute. What a doll!" It pinched Gerard's cheek and pushed the stray hairs off his face, and in different circumstances he probably would have swatted it away automatically, but he was too busy literally losing his mind over the fact that apparently Frank had been going around saying he was _cute_. When he glanced questioningly at Frank, Frank just grinned at him and shrugged. What the _fuck_.

Maybe he had meant cute like a dog or something. Could Moon Realm spirits even have legit feelings for humans? The fairies were acting like Gerard couldn't even hear them, giving their two cents on whether or not they thought he was cute - a big one with a reedy voice said it had no idea what everyone was talking about and that Gerard looked like a "little rat", _nice_ \- so that said a lot about how _they_ saw humans, at least.

"What's going on here?" asked a new voice. From the vines emerged a woman with pigtails, tattoos, and that same ethereal glow. She was carrying a backpack, had a cigarette dangling from one hand - spirits could _smoke_? - and, in general, looked like she was cooler than Gerard would ever be. She smiled when she saw Frank and Gerard. "Frank! Hey! Who's your friend?" she asked.

"Lindsey!" Frank exclaimed. "This is Gerard." He gestured towards Gerard, who was still getting poked by fairies.

Lindsey's eyes widened. "You mean- that's the kid? The kid you sent back to the Sun Realm? I thought you got him over there okay," she said. "Holy shit, did he bounce back?" Gerard wasn't sure what "bounce back" meant, but judging by Lindsey's tone of voice, it probably wasn't that great. She shooed the fairies away from him - fucking _finally_ \- and gave Frank a concerned look.

"No! He got back okay, I brought him here again on purpose," Frank defended. "I went to go check on him today, and-"

Lindsey gave Frank a look. "You aren't supposed to do that, Frankie."

"I had to check on him! He's _special_ ," Frank argued. The fairies giggled at that statement and one tugged on a strand of Gerard's hair. _Special_. It was so cheesy and bizarre Gerard could barely believe his fucking ears. First _cute_ , now _special_. Jesus, Frank really was gonna kill him.

" _Special_ , huh, Frankie?" one of the fairies snickered. Gerard was pretty sure if his face got any hotter it was going to start literally melting off.

Lindsey rolled her eyes. "Can you guys, like, fuck off? Please?" she asked the fairies. They flew away in a fit of giggles, imitating Frank the whole way out of the clearing.

"I just meant, like, I've never done this shit before!" Frank continued to Lindsey. "No one except you has; no one knows what really happens to people after they get sent back to the Sun Realm. He _is_ special; he's rare and I wanted to make sure weird shit didn't follow him home from here." He sighed. "But I think I messed something up, because he ran into fucking Allegra and Reed today. I think I did something wrong and he still has some kind of tie to the Moon Realm, or something." He turned to Gerard. "Explain the whole piano thing to her, I think you'll tell it better than I would."

Gerard tried his best to explain what the hell had happened to him that day, and when he finished, Lindsey's mouth dropped open. "Holy shit! Did they do anything else? Are you _okay_?

"No, I'm fine, that's all they did." Gerard said. "Should I...not be? Are they, like, really dangerous or something?" The whole Allegra and Reed situation had been unsettling, sure, but they hadn't really _done_ anything to Gerard besides harass him for about ten minutes.

She shook her head. "They're just, like, really crazy, and you never know what they're gonna do. I've never heard of them directly messing with humans like that though. They shouldn't be talking to you guys, that's like a huge rule." She laughed a little. "God, Frankie, I'm gone for a day to get Mutt food, and I come back to find out Allegra and Reed are gonna expose the whole Moon Realm." She opened her backpack a pulled out a burlap sack. "He's waking up soon, I had to get food to start preparing."

"I wanna hold Mutt," Frank said, and Gerard couldn't believe Frank was literally thinking about a dog when 1. they still had no idea whether he was a spirit-magnet or what and 2. apparently the entire fucking afterlife was at risk of getting outed to the world of the living. Priorities. "This shit has me stressed, I need to hug a dog."

Lindsey reached down below the counter of the hutch and picked up the source of the ongoing snoring. Gerard had expected it to be some kind of pug or bulldog thing with a messed-up snout to explain the intense snoring; he hadn't expected it to be a _skeleton dog_.

In the last 48 hours, Gerard had been bitten by a snake, died, traveled to the realm between life and death, sang to some living jack-o-laterns, been revived from the dead, targeted by angry music-themed spirits, passed through solid objects, been dragged by a literal fairy for looking like a rodent, and now he had encountered a skeleton dog that slept for a decade at a time. He didn't even understand how a dog like that could possibly exist, but he was beyond even questioning it at that point. He had officially seen it all.

"Okay, no offense, but...I think there are more important matters than the dog, here," Gerard said.

"Nothing's more important than Mutt," Frank said, cradling the skeleton dog close to his face even though the snores were probably blowing his eardrums out at that close a range. It was sweet, in a weird way, to see Frank cuddling with a puppy, even if that puppy was a literal skeleton and even if Frank was being completely useless in that moment. "Maybe he has some good ideas." He kissed the dog's skull.

Lindsey tapped her chin. "You know, I know you're joking, but maybe Mutt _can_ help us. He attracts the fairies - that's why they're always around here. He just has some kind of weird property about him that draws them to him. Maybe you got a weird property like that that attracts spirits after you crossed over," she said to Gerard.

"Did anything like that happen to the people who you sent back to the Sun Realm?" Frank asked.

"I don't know, Frankie, we _aren't_ supposed to go back and check on them," said Lindsey in an accusatory voice. Frank just huffed and cradled Mutt closer to his chest. It was unfairly cute. "But I'll look into it for you. I was planning to try and figure out what attracts the fairies to Mutt anyway, because I can't get _rid_ of the fucking things, so I'll see if humans can develop those properties too." She shrugged. "I mean, I don't know for sure if it's the same kind of thing as Mutt's fairy-magnet or whatever, but it's my best guess."

Frank's face brightened. "Thanks!" He turned to Gerard. "See, I told you. Lindsey is totally awesome." He pulled the bottle of paprika out of his coat pocket and tossed it to Lindsey. "I brought you this, by the way."

Lindsey laughed. "Thanks! Myrta Maples was just asking me if I had this shit for a luck potion she's working on, actually," she said, placing the paprika on her shelf. Gerard couldn't decide if his favorite part of that statement was the fact that someone named Myrta Maple was working on a luck potion, or the fact that paprika was apparently an essential ingredient in it. The Moon Realm was so fucking surreal. "I'll try my best to figure out what's going on here," Lindsey continued. "I've honestly never heard of anything like this happening before; I know that sounds like bullshit, but the spirits around here, other than the ferriers like us...keep to themselves, mostly. They don't mess with humans unless there's a specific reason." She winked at Gerard. "I guess you really _are_ special."

/

"I'm gonna keep an eye on you," Frank insisted as he and Gerard walked back through the forest. "Like, listen for my car over the next few days, that clanking shit. If you hear that it means I'm nearby and I'm there to check on you."

"Do you really think I have some kind of spirit-magnet thing going on?" Gerard asked. "I mean...Allegra and Reed are just two spirits. It was just a one-time thing."

Frank shook his head. "That just doesn't happen. Spirits from here do not fuck with humans directly like that; something is going on, and I swear we're gonna it figure out." He snorted. "You are _special_ , after all. Gotta watch out for you." He flashed Gerard a shit-eating grin.

This _fucker_. Gerard made a face. "Stop calling me that. You guys are having, like, way too much fucking fun with it. Those fairies thought I was, like, a circus act or some shit."

Frank giggled. "My favorite part was when you got called a rat. I definitely see the resemblance."

"Shut the fuck up. You said I was cute, asshole," Gerard argued.

Frank smiled and shrugged. "You _are_ cute. I never said I didn't think rats were cute." He paused and gave Gerard a once over. In a startlingly serious tone, he said, "You're, like, pretty. You have _really_ pretty eyes."

Gerard opened his mouth and then closed it again; he didn't really have a response to that. Sure, they were joking around, but hearing Frank, someone _really_ liked, directly tell him he was _pretty_ felt too weird and too unfamiliar. Gerard wasn't totally inexperienced when it came to, like, hooking up and shit - back in Jersey there had been a few people from around school, all from his art classes, who had mistaken him being a shut-in comic book nerd for him being purposely mysterious and brooding and _deep_ and hooked up with him, but then changed their minds about him once they realized he was less about Nietzsche and more about Star Wars - but when it came to actual _relationships_ he had nothing. No one had ever called him _pretty_. He had no idea how to react. It didn't compute. So he didn't say anything, and they fell into silence, but it felt like a comfortable silence.

They walked towards the part of the forest with the hearts again, which was pretty fucking fitting for that moment. The hearts themselves seemed to be glowing brighter than they had before, although that might have just been Gerard's crazy ass imagining things at that point. Frank's eyes watched the hearts sway carefully.

"I'm glad I could show you these," he said in a voice that was oddly soft. "Everyone here has already seen them. They were new to you." He giggled again. "You should've seen your face when you first saw this."

"I've never seen anything like it," Gerard agreed. "It's really something special."

Frank poked him. "Almost as special as you, Rat Face."

Gerard poked Frank back. "You're special too. Pretty sure you're the world's shortest wannabe punk."

"Wannabe?" Frank huffed. "I'm a goddamn harbinger of death. I'm more punk than you and your _artfully ripped_ Smashing Pumpkins shirt could ever be, asshole." He squeezed Gerard's hand. "You're lucky you _are_ cute. I'll let it slide." He pushed his face directly up to Gerard's and filled his entire line of vision; Gerard wondered if Frank needed to stand on his tip-toes to accomplish that. " _This_ time." He was so close Gerard could feel his breath on his face.

Up close Frank's eyes looked like the Moon Realm's sky itself. There could practically be constellations in them. It was the cheesiest thought that had ever entered Gerard's head. "Smashing Pumpkins are very punk, thanks," he replied, avoiding any weird sappy eye comments.

Frank backed up and quirked an eyebrow. "Hmm, I guess. A little basic though. You need some _music education_. Are the Bouncing Souls still around?"

"I think? I don't listen to that shit." Gerard tried to remember if the Bouncing Souls had ever come up on any of Mikey's playlists of weird hipster bands that no one but him listened to.

"Well, you gotta start. Sometime, at some point, when you're not in potential paranormal danger, we gotta hang out and I'll educate you," Frank said. "Plus, honestly, I just like being with you. I'd spend all my time with you if I could." He wrinkled his nose. "No one around here is interesting except Lindsey. Everyone's fucking boring. You're _different_."

Well, Gerard was officially not crazy, or delusional, or imagining things, or reading too much into the situation: there was no way, no _fucking way_ Frank would call him _pretty_ and then say, verbatim, the words "I'd spend all my time with you if I could" if he didn't feel at least _something_ for Gerard. Gerard's crush on a goddamn spectral entity was still weird, sure, but he was reasonably sure that that spectral entity liked him right back.

"Maybe," Gerard replied. "Sometime."

"Maybe," Frank repeated in an uncharacteristically soft voice. He took Gerard's hand, but it felt different this time, the kind of Different that probably warranted a capital letter. It was almost, _almost_ enough to make Gerard believe in the shitty love song lyrics that he had been pretty confident were all bull before.

But he was still king of killing the damn moment, and his mouth was apparently just completely disconnected from his brain at that point, so he just blurted out, "Your hands don't feel fucking freezing for once."

Frank laughed. " _Standing out in the freezing cold until I'm numb, wondering why I'm acting so dumb_ ," he sang, sounding slightly off-key and nasally, placing emphasis on the word _freezing_. He gave Gerard a meaningful look. "That's a fucking Bouncing Souls lyric. That's what you're missing out on."

"So not much," Gerard replied.

"You're such an asshole." Frank pushed Gerard's shoulder playfully. "I love it."

/

For the next week, nothing happened. After the fucking whirlwind of supernatural shit that went on Gerard's first week in Far Water, he was incredibly suspicious of the fact that nothing was happening, but...nothing was. His life was suddenly back to the same hum-drum shit it had been in Jersey, only this time with his new almost-friends, who he had to admit he was starting to think of as actual friends.

Or, it was _almost_ just normal hum-drum shit, except for the fact that Frank started hanging out in his room every night. Even though nothing was happening, every single night Frank would appear in the cemetery. Always around two or three in the morning, Gerard would hear a _clank, clank, clank_ coming from outside - his window was always cracked open, _just in case_ , even though at night an October chill always blew in and he had to bury himself under thousands of blankets to avoid freezing to death - and when he sprung up in bed to look out the window for Frank, sure enough, there he always was, glowing the graveyard like an angel of death or some emo shit like that. He would glide across the backyard, and then disappear from sight for a few minutes before passing straight through the wall into Gerard's room.

The first night it gave Gerard a literal heart attack - he had been squinting out the window trying to see where Frank went when the unexpected "Hi, Gee!" behind him startled him so much he fell off the bed and almost knocked an entire bookcase over, which Frank laughed at for about five solid minutes straight - but he started to look forward to it way more than he probably should've. Frank would ask if anything weird had happened to him that day, but he wouldn't leave when Gerard said nothing had. Instead, he would plop himself right down on Gerard's bed next to him and start talking and talking and _talking_. About Lindsey, and if she had found anything yet, and different creatures he had encountered that day, and his favorite bands - he forced Gerard to create a playlist specifically for his recommendations, starting with, of course, the Bouncing Souls - and everything else he could possibly think of. He and Frank would talk for hours, until the sun began to peek over the desert horizon, and Frank would sigh and say, "Guess I gotta go," before affectionately tugging on a lock of Gerard's hair and passing back through the wall without a sound. Sure, getting about an hour and a half of sleep total per night probably wasn't doing Gerard any favors - by Thursday his dark circles had reached a level he thought was impossible even for him, and Otter had gotten one look at him that day and immediately told him, "Dude, what the fuck, you look even more dead than usual," - but for Frank it was worth it.

On Thursday night, Gerard was still completely up when Frank glided into the room - _definitely_ not that he was waiting for him or anything like that - watching a top ten horror movie countdown video on Youtube on his shitty laptop. Before Gerard even had time to pause the video, Frank climbed under Gerard's covers, curled into his side, and casually announced, "This is such fucking bullshit. _Pet Sematary_ is number four? It doesn't belong in the fucking top fifty, let alone the top _five_ ," like he wasn't _literally_ _cuddling_ Gerard at that moment.

"More important question, who invited you into my bed?" Gerard asked, trying to take his mind off the fact that Frank was _definitely_ close enough to kiss at that moment. He was still pretty sure Frank liked him, at least a little bit, but Frank had yet to make any kind of move and Gerard had no idea how to interpret that. Maybe he really wasn't interested, maybe kissing a human would violate some kind of Moon Realm spirit code of conduct, maybe he was waiting for _Gerard_ to make the first move - which, in that case, meant he'd pretty much be waiting forever before Gerard's insecure ass made anything even _resembling_ a move.

Frank giggled and snuggled further into Gerard's side. "You looked warm. I'm trying to steal your body heat," he said. He rested his head against Gerard's chest and closed his eyes; Gerard, meanwhile, was going into literal cardiac arrest. Frank had to cut this mixed signals shit out, for real.

Frank didn't sleep - at one point, when Gerard asked, "Are you asleep?", he snorted and said, "No. Perks of being a spirit - I don't sleep. Like, ever." - but he stayed there, curled up in the fetal position, eyes screwed shut, for long enough that Gerard felt his eyelids start to droop, too, and the whole less-than-two-hours-of-sleep a night thing he had been doing for the past week caught up to him. He fell asleep with the entire right side of his body freezing from Frank and a Misfits lyric video still playing on his laptop.

When he woke up Frank was gone, but he found a note scrawled in the sketchbook he had left open on his disaster of a desk: _"you snore & talk in your sleep. it's cute though. xofrank"_

_/_

At lunch the next Wednesday, Pete announced, "Okay. Bitches. We're going to the fucking corn maze this weekend. For _real_ this year."

Otter wrinkled his nose. "Aren't we, like, too old for that shit? Like, way too old? Don't we have better things to do on Friday nights?"

"No," Pete said. "We've meant to go every year since, like, 8th grade but for some reason we never do, and now that we're seniors, next fall we - if there's any fucking hope - won't still be stuck in Far Water, so this is our _last chance_." He slammed his hands dramatically on the picnic table.

"The corn maze is the shit and we should definitely go," Ray agreed. "At least for old times' sake."

"What's so special about a corn maze?" Gerard asked. He had been to corn mazes before, and they weren't that spectacular. At least, he didn't think they were exciting enough to warrant being called _the shit_ by a senior in high school.

"It's, like, a joint haunted house and corn maze thing they put on every year here. It's a big deal, I guess, pretty much everyone goes," Patrick explained. "It's, like, a Far Water tradition, but we haven't gone in years because something always comes up and we miss it. We were really close to going last year, but then Pete got ' _sick'_ ," he laughed, placing air quotes around "sick" and rolling his eyes at Pete.

"I had tuberculosis, fuck you!" Pete argued.

"You didn't have fucking _tuberculosis_ , asshole, you just didn't wanna go because you knew Ashley was gonna be there and she dumped you, like, the day before-" Otter replied.

"Okay, _okay_ , what _ever_ , but either way, we're going this year," Pete insisted. "And you," he turned to Gerard, "have to come. I don't care if a corn maze isn't emo enough for you or whatever the fuck, you have to come. You can't miss the corn maze your first October in Far Water. You too, Bob, you only ever went that one time in 7th grade."

Bob huffed and rolled his eyes, but Gerard just nodded solemnly. He was surprised, to say the least; he ate lunch and hung out with these guys at school, but he didn't think they liked him enough to want to see him beyond that. Far Water really was a place of new experiences: dying, falling halfway in love with an inhuman entity, and people actually liking him enough to want to hang out with him outside of school. "Sure," he said. "I'll go." Wow, this was what it was like to have friends - friends that weren't spectral entities and that he didn't have a maybe-almost-relationship with.

"It's settled. Patrick can drive us in his mom van - right, Pat?" Pete continued.

"I love Patrick's shitty mom van!" Otter exclaimed. "It's so suburban. So domestic. I always feel like one of your 2.5 kids getting picked up from soccer practice in it."

Patrick snorted. "Everyone judges my van. It's the only car big enough to haul all you nerds around - be grateful for it."

"We can go to my house after," Ray suggested. "Guitar hero and booze and shit. The only person who'll be home is my younger brother and, like, probably his weird friends."

"Sick. Corn maze, beer, and a possible guest appearance by Brendon Urie," Pete said, taking a bite of his sandwich. "Maybe he'll think you're a ghost, Gerard."

"I got, I think, four hours of sleep last night, and that's the most I've gotten in the past two weeks. I'm fading fast. I'm half-dead already. Maybe he'll record me on his EVP device," Gerard replied. Frank had still, like clockwork, been coming around every night, only ever since that night the week before he immediately would just crawl into Gerard's bed, bury himself under the covers even though there was no way they could possibly be keeping him warm, and scrunch up in a ball under Gerard's arm. Frank really, _really_ liked hugs, and cuddling, and human contact in general, none of which Gerard had ever been particularly big on, but whatever, if Frank wanted to curl up so close next to Gerard that the only way to tell whose limbs were whose was the difference in body temperature, he wasn't going to complain.

Frank had stopped asking if anything paranormal had happened to Gerard altogether. He said Lindsey had no updates, but insisted he was still coming by because Halloween was coming up and weird shit might start happening because that was when "the boundaries between the realms were at their thinnest", whatever that fucking meant. Gerard was pretty sure Frank just wanted to see him though, and it made the fact that he had literally felt the need to Google whether lack of sleep could kill him feel _mostly_ worth it.

"Four hours of sleep? Amen," said Ray. "AP physics is killing me. I haven't slept since school started. I forget what sleep feels like." Gerard had kind of forgotten other people stayed up late doing homework or playing video games or normal shit like that. Seeing Frank had become so routine it was strange to even think of doing anything else at night. What did it feel like to not stay up every night hanging with your weird spectral love interest? Gerard could barely remember.

Otter snorted. "Better rest up for Friday," he said to Gerard. "I want someone to finally take down Toro on Guitar Hero. None of us can beat him, you're our only hope."

/

The sun had just begun to set on Friday when the proverbial mom van pulled into Gerard's driveway at six on the fucking dot; Patrick was nothing if not punctual. His phone beeped three times all at once - three different texts from Pete, Ray, and Otter, all just reading "here" - and he pulled on his coat. "I'm leaving!" he called as he fumbled through his backpack to find his house key.

"Who are all these kids?" his dad asked, peering out the front window. "Are these your _friends_?" The surprise in his voice would probably have insulted someone else, but Gerard really didn't have any grounds to be offended. He had spent seventeen solid years as a lone wolf; a Friday night spent with a teenage squad was pretty much what his dad had always dreamed of for him.

"Isn't it crazy?" Mikey asked, his usual monotone making it sound like he didn't think it was _crazy_ at all. "Gee has friends now. I'm proud of him."

"Are they who you stay up talking to every night? I was getting worried; I thought you were talking to yourself until I heard someone talking back," his dad said. Mikey chuckled and gave him a knowing look. Wow, Gerard was not nearly as stealthy as he thought he was being. He thought no one had any idea that he was up every night; apparently he forgot the walls were literally paper thin, and that his family was full of the type of people who woke up if a bug crawled across the floor. At least they didn't know _who_ he was up talking to, which would probably have been a lot fucking harder to explain.

"Yeah," he lied. "They're big on Skype."

Gerard walked out to the car and Patrick hit the button to open the van's big sliding door. "This really is some suburban mom shit," Gerard laughed. "Sliding doors and everything."

"You haven't seen the half of it," said Otter. "He keeps fruit snacks in the glove compartment. It's so soccer mom."

"If everyone doesn't stop dragging my car, I will turn this van around and we will _go home_ ," Patrick joked as he turned out of Gerard's neighborhood. He glanced at Gerard. "I didn't know you lived on Hollow Street. My grandparents used to live in the house across the street. My brother and sister and I used to play in that cemetery for hours."

"You would play in a cemetery? Fucking morbid," Bob snorted.

"Doesn't every kid do that? I thought that was a universal childhood thing," Patrick replied, eyes furrowed.

"I wouldn't even _breathe_ passing by cemeteries as a kid. I thought a ghost could get inside my body through my breath or something," Otter said with a laugh. "Now I don't even believe in ghosts. That shit's made up."

Pete shook his head. "Ghosts are fucking real, are you kidding me? How do you explain that shit that happened to Gerard a while back? Ghosts, man."

"Listen. I'm not saying that didn't happen, I'm just saying it was probably some kind of prank. You know how seriously people take Halloween around here. It was probably, like, a really well-coordinated prank."

"How would they know he was going to be in the South F wing? It's closed. No one goes down there," Ray argued.

Gerard had kind of forgotten he'd told these guys about his run-in with Allegra and Reed. At that time he hadn't made the Moon Realm connection and thought he had just had a run-in with some fucking poltergeists; should he have not told them? Was that against some kind of rules? It was pretty surreal to hear them argue about what had happened to him while he knew the truth the whole time, but he was pretty sure telling them about the Moon Realm was a pretty big no-go. Did they know too much already? Jesus. Frank should have given him some kind of handbook for this shit.

"I _said_ really-well coordinated! Everybody in Far Water is fucking nuts and I wouldn't put it past any of them to do shit like that," Otter insisted. "I bet it was Gabe Saporta and his friends, you know they'll mess with anyone. Remember what they did to you in 6th grade, Ray?"

Ray groaned. "Don't remind me. I still can't eat baked ziti."

Gerard nodded. "I mean, it could have been a prank," he said, even though he knew it wasn't. He had to change the subject or something, his poker face was shit and he had probably unintentionally broken some kind of rule by telling them about it in the first place. "I don't know what they did to you with the ziti, but honestly, I'm not sure I want to."

"Oh no, you want to. It's great," Bob said with a chuckle. "I'm still mad I lived in Chicago then and didn't get to experience it in person."

Ray hit his arm."Wow, I have such supportive friends. Let's have you get an entire trashcan of baked ziti dumped on you, see how you like it," he said, shaking head. "Fucking traumatic."

The ride was only about ten minutes - it didn't take long to get _anywhere_ in Far Water - but by the time they got there Gerard's "ghost" encounter was long forgotten and everyone was, thankfully, much more interested in reliving the story of Ray's 6th grade battle against ziti-bearing bullies, which, to Ray's credit, did sound pretty traumatic. As they climbed out of the car, Gerard found himself thinking that Frank would really like these guys, and it was too bad he couldn't be there. Frankly, a good amount of the problems in Gerard's life could be solved if Frank was a regular human being.

By the time they got to the maze there were already droves of people at the entrance; it was the Friday before Halloween, and a corn maze-haunted house combo was probably about the most exciting thing going on in Far Water, so practically the entire town was there. They paid the price to get in - "Holy shit, it's twelve dollars to get in now? Inflation hit the corn maze hard," remarked Pete - and shuffled into the maze.

"So the idea here is you get through the maze to reach the haunted house," Ray explained to Gerard. He turned to the rest of the group. "I heard they made it harder this year. People were complaining it was too easy last year or something."

"Leave it to the people of Far Water, New Mexico to get genuinely mad about the difficulty level of a fucking corn maze," snorted Bob. "I can't wait to get out of this shithole. Graduation can't come soon enough."

"Well, the beginning is still the same. I remember this from, like, elementary school," Pete said, leading the group down one of the trails in the maze. "It's like, left, right, left first."

For about five minutes they went through the maze, and the further in they got, the less people they seemed to see. "What the fuck happened to everyone?" Gerard asked. "There were about a billion people at the entrance."

"Uh, yeah, that's weird," Patrick agreed. "Where did everyone go?"

"Maybe we're, like, super lost," Ray suggested. "Like, so lost that there's no one else even in this part of the maze."

"Well, it _was_ supposed to be harder this year. If we're lost then it just means the town committee came through for the community and their corn maze-related needs," Otter said with an eye-roll.

"We are, like, so fucking lost," said Bob after about another 5 minutes of wandering through the corn as the sky got darker and darker and they still saw no sign of any other maze-goers. The sudden lack of all people was honesty starting to freak Gerard out a little - it was way too reminiscent of his South F wing experience - but they couldn't possibly be _that_ lost. The town was the size of a fucking pinhead to begin with, and this was a family-friendly _corn maze_. They weren't out in the goddamn wilderness somewhere; Gerard just had to chill. "Your guidance has let us down, Pete."

Pete laughed. "I guess this is it, we're just gonna die in the corn. Rest in pieces, guys. It was nice knowing you."

"I need motivation to carry on. What kind of beer's at your house, Toro? If it's Bud Light I'm dying right here. Bud Light is not worth struggling my way out of the corn," Otter joked.

They swapped their death-by-corn jokes for another few minutes, wandering in what Gerard was starting to suspect was just one giant circle - though, frankly, it all looked about the same, so who could really tell - when he heard footsteps approaching from behind them. He whipped around to see another kid who looked about their age, but he didn't recognize him from around school.

"Oh my god, _other people_!" the kid exclaimed. "I was starting to think I was alone in here!" He let out a breath of relief. "Sorry. I lost my friends in here somewhere like twenty minutes ago and haven't seen another person since. I was starting to think I was gonna die in here."

Pete laughed. "We were just talking about that! We haven't seen anyone in, like, at least fifteen minutes. We're next-level lost. You know a way out of here? At least back to the entrance?"

The kid shook his head. "Man, I was gonna ask you guys that. I have no idea where I am or where my friends went, and cell service sucks ass in here."

Everyone else started commiserating with the kid on being really lost and how lame it was to get lost in the Far Water Halloween corn maze of all places, but Gerard hung back. Something seemed...off about the kid in a way he couldn't describe. He didn't seem off in the sense that he was, like, drunk or stoned or anything, but something just did not seem right about him to Gerard.

It took him a minute to realize what the deal was: the kid had a very, very faint but unmistakeable _luminescent glow_. Gerard had to blink a few times to make sure he wasn't seeing shit, but no, it was definitely there. This kid was, just slightly, glowing like Frank and Lindsey and Allegra and Reed. This kid, Gerard was almost 95% sure, was some kind of Moon Realm spirit, and suddenly the lack of people around them and quickly darkening sky seemed a hell of a lot more fucking freaky.

Sure, Gerard knew that Moon Realm spirits weren't all bad; Frank certainly wasn't, and neither was Lindsey. The fairies seemed benevolent enough, and Frank had told him stories about other spirits he knew who sounded like they were nice. But Gerard couldn't shake the feeling that this kid wasn't one of those spirits. It was like he suddenly had some kind of third eye or sixth sense; something was wrong here, and he fucking knew it.

"I think we're gonna try heading that way next," Ray told the kid, motioning to one of the trails nearby, completely oblivious to the fact that Gerard was swiftly moving into crisis mode. Every second that ticked by he was more and more sure in his theory that this kid wasn't human; it was only subtle, little things that gave it away, but Gerard had been spending enough time around Frank lately to know a Moon Realm spirit when he saw one. There was, of course, the fucking glow, but he also noticed something in the kid's eyes, something about the way he moved. Suddenly Frank's spiel about how Moon Realm shit could start happening to Gerard again as Halloween approached didn't seem like just a bullshit excuse to hang out anymore.

"I already went that way," said the kid. "It's a dead end. I haven't tried that way, yet, though." He motioned to a trail leading in the opposite direction. "I was gonna go that way. You guys tried it yet?"

"No, not yet," Otter replied. "You guys wanna try it? We've probably gone down every other fucking path in this maze at this point."

Everyone hummed in agreement, but the last thing Gerard wanted to do was take any of this...thing's advice. If all these guys literally died because Gerard attracted a malevolent Moon Realm spirit to them he'd never forgive himself, especially now that he knew for a fact there was definitely an afterlife and he would definitely be able to feel guilty in it.

The kid seemed pleased they were gonna go the way he told them to, Gerard's friends were completely unaware of the situation, Gerard got more sure of the fact that this kid was a spirit with every second that ticked by, and he was pretty sure he was gonna hurl. When everybody started to head down the path the kid had suggested, Gerard couldn't help it - he let out an incredibly strangled-sounding "No!"

Everyone turned to look at him; they were probably regretting inviting his weird ass along, but he _knew_ something was up and he just _knew_ bad shit was gonna go down if they listened to that kid. He had to get them the fuck out of that maze asap. "Are you okay?" Patrick asked him, looking genuinely concerned. "You look a little...green."

"Yeah, I'm fine," Gerard said, trying to cover. "I just...think we already went that way. That one's a dead-end too, I think."

The kid gave him a long look. Gerard almost flinched at the extended eye-contact. The quote about gazing into the abyss or whatever floated into his mind; it was that fucking unsettling. Then, in what was pretty much the stuff of every nightmare Gerard had ever had, the kid laughed in an incredibly dissonant cackle, and said words he was pretty sure would haunt him for the rest of his goddamn life: "You know, I should've known you'd see right through me, Gerard."

Well, if there was doubt that Gerard was wrong about this kid not being human before, they went out the window right about then. Gerard's stomach leaped into his throat, and when he caught a glance at his friends, they looked just as spooked. "How the fuck do you know his name?" Bob, who was apparently afraid of literally nothing, demanded.

The kid didn't answer; instead, his booming laughter grew louder and louder, seeming to rustle the leaves on the ground, ringing in Gerard's ears. Gerard shot a worried glance at his friends; Pete looked like he was going to cry - Gerard was pretty much right there with him - Ray, Otter, and Patrick looked like they were about to shit themselves, and Bob, God fucking bless him, somehow still just looked mad. The kid's laughter never stopped, but right before their eyes, he started to transform: skin seemed to pale and hair seemed to dry to an alarmingly brittle texture. He grew taller and taller and his glow grew brighter and brighter until they could finally see what he was turning into: a _scarecrow_. A goddamn 10-foot-tall monster _scarecrow_.

"Holy shit! What the fuck is that?" cried Otter. Gerard had no idea what it was; he had seen ferriers, spirits, witches, fairies, singing pumpkins, and a skeleton dog, but no one had ever mentioned _monster scarecrows._

The scarecrow laughed its sinister laugh in response; chills ran up Gerard's spine. "Gerard!" it called, completely ignoring Otter, its booming voice seeming to make the ground shake. "We've been looking all over for you!"

"What does it want with you? What's going on?" Pete asked fearfully, through chattering teeth. "Who's _we_?"

"I don't know," Gerard said in a panicked voice. "I don't know."

He didn't. He had no fucking clue why this weird shit was happening to him; Frank had no idea, Lindsey hadn't found anything, and he had let his guard down after the two solid weeks that had just gone by without incident. He knew it had to have _something_ to do with when he was sent back to the Sun Realm after the snakebite, but he didn't know exactly what attracted this evil Moon Realm voodoo magic shit to him, how to get it to stop, or if he and his friends were about to die at the hands of a fucking mutant scarecrow monster because of it. Jesus, Gerard finally made friends, and then he immediately put their lives in danger because he was some kind of evil spirit-magnet. He really should not have been allowed around other people.

The wind started to pick up and the sky, which had still been fairly light before then, the last rays of daylight still peeking over the endless corn, turned dark and cloudy. This thing was manipulating the fucking _weather_ \- they were gonna die. They were gonna die.

Over the howling wind and the scarecrow laughing and everybody just randomly screaming, Bob yelled, "Guys! It's _one_ fucking scarecrow! There's _six_ of us, it's six against one, we could beat it!"

Wow. In the event of the apocalypse - although this didn't seem that far off - Gerard definitely would want Bob on his side. Gerard knew that this thing had to be some kind of Moon Realm creature, so he had at least a _vague_ idea of what it could do; Bob had zero idea what it was and was still ready to just straight-up beat its ass. Bob had _guts_.

"Uh, Bob?" Ray called, although the wind was picking up and it was getting harder and harder to hear, "I'm not sure about that!" He jabbed his finger at something behind the scarecrow, his eyes wild and his face pale.

Before that moment, Gerard was already reasonably sure he about to get himself and the only friends he had ever had fucking murdered at a goddamn Halloween corn maze, and he was gonna have to deal with that for the rest of his afterlife, but when he looked at what Ray was pointing at, that's when he knew they were fucked for sure. Emerging from behind the cornstalks were _more_ _scarecrows_ , each one looking more sinister than the last.

"There's more! Turn around! There's more!" Otter yelled, turning in the other direction.

To Gerard's horror, there were even _more_ scarecrows approaching from all sides. They were completely surrounded; if they even knew how to get the fuck out of the corn maze in the first place, now there was nowhere to escape. The scarecrows were closing in, and there was nowhere to turn. Gerard's heart was pounding so hard that it felt like he would probably go into cardiac arrest and die anyway before the scarecrows even had the chance to do anything to him.

Pete was full-on screaming at that point - maybe the other guys were too, but Gerard could only tell that Pete was because he was screaming directly into Gerard's ear, clutching Gerard's arm so hard it felt like the bone might snap - and Gerard was pretty sure Ray yelled something after that, too, but he could barely hear them any more over this scarecrow army's sickening chorus of laughter and the wind that was, by that point, whipping so hard Gerard was having trouble keeping his eyes open. They were being cornered by ten-foot-tall scarecrow monsters, it was too loud to even attempt to formulate any kind of plan because no one could hear anyone else, and time was running out. This was how it was gonna end, for real this time. This was Gerard's third potential brush with death in under a month; that had to be some kind of record.

The scarecrows were so close by then that Gerard could _smell_ them - they smelled like hay and leaves and normal scarecrow shit, but they also had that Moon Realm scent, the incense and old books and pine needles-type scent. He huddled against his friends and squeezed his eyes shut, mostly involuntarily from the wind, which was probably approaching tornado levels at that point. He wanted to do something, _anything_ , but he had no idea how to fight against Moon Realm creatures. _Could_ they be fought against? Could they die? Was that even a thing? Gerard didn't know. He just didn't know.

Then, over the wind, over the screaming, over the laughter, Gerard heard it: it sounded like a firework, or a sudden boom of thunder, and it practically shook the ground. Gerard didn't know what the scarecrows were doing to make that noise, but he was sure it wasn't good news for him until then, strong and clear as a bell: "Don't fucking _touch_ him."

Gerard's eyes shot open. Into the maze had rolled a strange, purple fog, and at the center of it all, looking thunderously angry and like most beautiful thing Gerard had ever fucking seen, was _Frank_. Frank had come. Frank was there.

Gerard had never seen Frank look the way he did in that moment. He looked so ethereal, intangible, like he himself was made of the fog. His face was contorted into the most angry expression Gerard had ever seen on anyone, and his eyes were glowing brighter than ever before.

"Frank!" he yelled, even though he could barely be heard over all the commotion.

"Who's _that_?" Patrick yelled back, still sounding scared out of his mind. It took a moment for Gerard to register the fact that his friends had never met Frank; they had no idea that he was there to save them, not hurt them. To them, Frank probably just looked like another evil supernatural thing there to kill them, which, Gerard could admit, if he had met Frank while he had that thunderous expression on his face, he probably would've made that assumption too.

"We are gonna fucking die. We are so, totally gonna fucking die," Pete said, his voice high-pitched with fear. There was another thunder-like noise, and the fog rose higher in the maze, surrounding them like a violet smoke.

Frank wasn't listening to any of them, though. His eyes were focused completely on the main scarecrow, the first one, the one that had posed as a kid at first. " _Don't touch him_ ," Frank repeated in what could only be described as a snarl, his voice booming. Even Gerard took a step back in surprise; Jesus, he didn't think Frank had this kind of behavior in him.

To Gerard's surprise, the scarecrow cut the endless laugh track shit out and spoke directly to Frank. "What are you gonna do, Frankie?" it snarled right back. "Save them? What have you ever saved?"

Gerard felt anger flash through him at the scarecrow's taunts; sure, he had no idea _what_ he expected Frank to do to save them, but Frank was there, raring and ready to go and fight to save Gerard's dumb ass and his poor, unsuspecting friends. Frank was _brave_ , and Gerard didn't like hearing some goddamn mutant stack of hay talking shit about him.

Gerard _didn't_ know what he expected Frank to do, but it ended up the last thing he ever would've guessed: with another thunder-clap, as the fog began to whip around them in a circle like the wind was, Frank straight-up shoved his hand into the scarecrow's chest and _ripped out its heart_.

They all screamed, including Gerard. Pete looked like he was about to faint. It was completely unexpected - they had just watched Frank, little Frank, I-Wanna-Hug-a-Dog Frank who Gerard didn't think had a violent bone in his otherworldly body deadass rip out another creature's heart with his bare hands. Or, at least, it looked like it was the scarecrow's heart at first; when Gerard looked closer, he saw it wasn't really a heart, but some kind of round, purple object.

Whatever it was, it was clearly whatever gave the scarecrows their life-force, because without it the main scarecrow just...fell apart. Not in the weird, traumatic limb-by-limb way Reed had; just in the way an old scarecrow, a normal one that wasn't alive or trying to, you know, kill anybody, might fall apart. It just flopped over, like an old rag doll, and so did all the others. They must have been connected in some way, bound by one power source.

As the scarecrows died, so did the wind, and finally the corn maze was quiet, but Frank was still thundering. He lunged at Gerard, pulling Gerard's face down to meet his and sweeping his eyes wildly across it, inspecting for damage. "Did they do anything to you?" he demanded, and the thunder noise sounded again. Gerard's eyes widened; the thunder had been from _Frank_ , not the scarecrows. It was some kind of physical manifestation of his anger. Holy shit.

"Okay, what the _hell_ was that and who the hell is this?" Bob demanded, his eyebrows knit together. "Leave him alone!" He shouted at Frank.

What a good fucking friend - probably better than Gerard really deserved, considering Bob almost got killed two seconds ago because of him. Bob probably thought Frank was gonna try and kill them too, and despite the fact that he just watched Frank rip a heart out with his bare hands literally _moments before_ , Bob was still ready to fight him to defend his friends. Gerard was a chickenshit who was so terrified of needles he had to give himself a 45-minute pep talk before going to the doctor'sin case he had to get blood drawn,meanwhile Bob apparently feared no man and no God. Goals.

Frank, however, didn't appreciate Bob's brave gesture of friendship, because the thunder sounded again, this time shaking the ground for real, and sent Bob tumbling into the corn. "Bob! Holy shit!" Gerard heard Ray stage-whisper. "Don't make it mad! You don't know what it could do!"

"Did they do anything to you?" Frank demanded again, completely ignoring Ray and Bob. "I swear to God, they were gonna kill you. They were fucking gonna kill you and you aren't supposed to die now and - and it's not supposed to be _painful_." He was speaking so quickly Gerard could barely even follow what he was saying. "It isn't supposed to be painful when you die. That's not how it's supposed to go for you. I couldn't let them hurt you, I couldn't." The thunder sounded, and the fog began to swirl again.

"No! I'm fine, Frankie," Gerard insisted, trying to calm Frank down. Judging from their expressions, his friends were still scared out of their minds - except Bob, of course - and Gerard didn't wanna scare them any more, especially when there was no reason to be afraid of Frank. "I'm okay. They didn't do anything. They didn't even touch me, you saved us, see? We're fine." He gestured at his friends, who definitely didn't look fine - Pete was _visibly shaking_ at this point.

"Gerard?" Patrick asked hesitantly, looking completely bewildered. "You uh, know this guy?"

Frank's face was still locked in a scowl, but the fog and wind were dying down, so Gerard figured now was a better time than any to explain. "So. Guys. This is Frank."

/

It turned out "explaining" was a lot easier said than done.

"Wait, when did you get bitten by a snake?" Ray asked, looking puzzled. "How did I miss that?"

"It was the first night I was here. I got lost in the desert by the forest and got bit," Gerard replied. "But, like, I wasn't supposed to die? I guess? So Frank had to bring me back."

Frank, who had started to calm down once he realized Gerard was okay - Gerard tried _really hard_ not to think about how worried Frank had been that he had been hurt - nodded. "Death dates are predetermined. The day you're supposed to die is set in stone, and if you die before it, then one of us has to bring you back over," he supplied. "It almost never happens though, so like, don't worry about it happening to you or anything," he quickly added. That probably sounded kind of bullshit to this group of guys who had literally just _all_ almost died before their predetermined death dates, but Gerard appreciated Frank was at least trying to sooth everyone's nerves. Learning about the Moon Realm was an overwhelming thing.

"Okay, I don't believe this," Otter said skeptically. "You, like, attract ghosts now, Gee? And what's this Moon Realm shit? Like the afterlife? This can't be real." He shook his head.

Gerard honestly didn't blame Otter for not believing it; half because Gerard could barely believe the shitstorm that had been the last month of his life himself, and half because he knew Otter was a total skeptic to begin with. Otter didn't even believe in _ghosts_ , which were pretty run-of-the-mill when it came to paranormal shit. It was gonna pretty hard to get him to believe in the fucking _Moon Realm_.

"You just saw a guy turn into a fucking scarecrow _._ What don't you believe?" Pete asked. "Like, dude. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself either, but we all saw it. This guy is fucking _glowing_ in front of us, and you're still skeptical?"

"I'm just saying it doesn't sound legit," Otter insisted. "I'm not trying to say you're a liar, Gerard, I'm just saying I feel like if this Moon Realm shit was for real, wouldn't we have all heard about it by now? What's the proof?"

Frank cocked his head. "Hmm. Proof," he said playfully, clearly having a good time with Otter's skepticism. "Okay, well, for starters, your name isn't Otter, it's Matt, your birthday is March 16th, you were born in Santa Fe, and - well, I'm not supposed to tell you what day you're gonna die, but if you _really_ want I could go check and then report back," he said with a lopsided grin.

Otter's eyes widened. "How the fuck did you know all that?"

"I know that stuff about everyone," Frank shrugged. "It's my job."

Gerard was as surprised as Otter; he had no idea Frank just had that info about everybody. He wondered what else Frank knew; there was a lot of shit he would, uh, _prefer_ Frank rather not know about him.

Pete had still looked fairly shaken up until that point, but his eyes lit up at that. "That's so freaky, man! When's my birthday, do you know?"

"Guys, there are more important matters here," Ray interjected, looking serious. "If these - what, spirits? - are, like, hunting Gerard down, then, if tonight is any indication, none of us are safe. We gotta figure out how to stop them."

"Uh, I don't know how much we could really do," said Gerard. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate Ray trying to help - he did, he totally did. He was pretty bowled over these guys hadn't taken off running and ditched him the minute the fog cleared, and even more surprised they wanted to help. It was just that he didn't think they could do anything about it; even _Lindsey_ couldn't figure out what was attracting the spirits to Gerard, and she seemed to know more about the Moon Realm than anyone.

"We have to at least _try_. We gotta, like, brainstorm and figure this out. We're all in danger," Ray said. "We gotta do something. I don't want anyone murdered in another drive-by scarecrow attack."

Frank smiled. "Now here's a man with a plan!" He looked more like the Frank Gerard was used to; all smiles, glowing eyes. It was hard to believe this was the same Frank who had ripped out a literal heart in a fit of comic book-style vigilante justice, like, fifteen minutes before.

Patrick laughed, sounding a little nervous. He looked like he still didn't fully know what to make of Frank. "Ray always has a plan. If anyone can figure this out, it's him."

"Let's go to my house and try to come up with something," Ray suggested. He turned to Frank. "You said this shit gets worse the closer it gets to Halloween, right? Halloween's in three days. We gotta figure something out before something worse happens."

"I take it that means no guitar hero, tonight?" Gerard joked nervously. He literally could not believe Ray was this committed to helping him. Sure, part of it had to be because the scarecrows could've killed all of them, not just Gerard, but Gerard was pretty sure the more obvious option here was to stop being friends with the evil-magnet, not brainstorm solutions to the issue. These guys were way too good for his problematic ass.

"Bigger fish to fry," Ray replied, using an expression that Gerard was fairly certain no other 17-year-old would ever unironically use. "Can you come to people's houses? Is that a thing?" Ray asked Frank. "We need your help."

Frank nodded. "I can do houses."

"You're inviting the ghost to your house?" Bob asked Ray, sounding bewildered. He ran a hand down his face. "First we almost got killed by scarecrows, then we learned Gerard came back from the dead, and now we're gonna go hang with a _ghost_ at Toro's house so we can try to figure out how to prevent being attacked by _more ghosts_. What the fuck is my life?"

"Welcome to my world, man," said Gerard.

"Not ghosts!" Frank added. " _Spirits_. They're a different thing. Ghosts aren't real."

Otter, who had still looked torn between skeptical and mad, finally laughed. "See! I told all you bitches ghosts don't exist!"

/

"If the ghost stands us up I am so gone," said Otter, slumped on Ray's old couch that was covered in mysterious stains that were _hopefully_ beer or pizza sauce but Gerard definitely wasn't gonna ask. They were in Ray's basement, and had gotten there at least fifteen minutes ago, but there was still no sign of Frank. He had said he would meet them there to discuss Operation: Save Gerard's Ass, but he had yet to appear. If Gerard's friends, who really had no obligation help with his fucked-up spirit-magnet problem, were still sticking with him at this point, then Frank had _better_ show up. He couldn't ditch Gerard at this point.

"Did Frank look, like, really familiar to anyone else?" Patrick asked. "I swear I've seen him somewhere before."

"I'm pretty sure you'd remember meeting an angry, glowing midget," Bob snorted.

"I'm not saying I've _met_ him before. I'm just saying I think I've _seen_ him before," Patrick clarified. "There's a difference."

"Maybe you saw him during a near-death experience!" Pete suggested. "Like how some people say they saw the grim reaper during a near-death experience. You've almost died a few times. Remember in 4th grade when you almost drowned in my grandma's pool?"

"For the record, I didn't see Frank until I was already dead," Gerard said. It felt weird to say it out loud - he had been for real, no heartbeat _dead_. Crazy shit. "Good theory though."

"I still can't believe you were seriously dead," Pete replied. "No wonder you're so emo."

The door at the top of the basement stairs creaked open. "Who's emo?" asked Ray's younger brother, bounding down the stairs.

"My sister dated an emo guy one time, but my parents made her dump him," said a voice behind Ray's brother.

Ray made a face. "Hey, Brendon," he said unenthusiastically as Brendon Urie came down the stairs after Ray's brother.

Pete stifled a laugh. "Oh my god, I'm living. We're about to experience Brendon's bullshit _live and in person_ ," he whispered.

"We're just here for sodas, don't worry," Ray's brother said, opening the mini-fridge in the corner of the basement and giving Ray a pointed look. He clearly knew how Ray felt about Brendon.

Of course, Frank picked that _exact fucking moment_ to make his appearance. Gerard heard the familiar _clank, clank, clank_ of Frank's car outside, and he hoped it would take Frank a few minutes to get down to the basement and give Ray's brother and Brendon a second to get upstairs without seeing him because Gerard _really_ did not need to drag more people into this, but no such luck. "Okay, I'm here!" Frank announced, passing straight through the wall and effectively ruining any slim chance he had at passing off as just a normal guy.

Ray's brother dropped his soda can in surprise. "What the _fuck_?" he said, reacting like a normal human being to some kind of entity passing through the wall into their basement.

"Uh, so, I can explain this, bro -" Ray began, even though he probably still only barely understood what Frank was, but Brendon cut him off.

"Oh my gosh!" he cried. "A ferrier! Wow!"

Gerard actually gasped. So he had been more than right when he thought Brendon knew something about the Moon Realm; apparently, Brendon knew enough to be able to identify a ferrier _on sight_. Holy shit.

"A what?" Ray's brother asked, sounding completely baffled. "What did you call him?"

"A ferrier," Brendon stated simply, pushing his glasses up on his nose. "That's what you are, right?" he asked Frank. "Like Lindsey?"

Gerard was officially spooked. How did this kid know this much? Where could have he possibly gotten this info? Gerard glanced at his friends and they looked just as shocked as he did; everyone thought Brendon's paranormal expertise was limited to what he learned from ghost-hunting Wikihow articles. No one knew he knew _this much_.

"Wait!" Frank exclaimed. "You're not...are you _little Brendon_? Who Lindsey brought back, like, a decade ago? Holy shit!"

"Yeah!" Brendon said cheerfully, completely oblivious to the fact that everyone else was in complete shock. "I got hit by a car when I was five because I chased after a ball that went into the street, but I wasn't supposed to die then, so Lindsey brought me back."

 _Brendon_ was one of the few other people who had been brought back from an untimely death. He had _been_ to the Moon Realm. That's how he knew all this shit. Gerard couldn't believe it. Only three people including himself had ever had to be brought back from the Moon Realm in all of human history, and two of them were alive at the exact same time living in the exact same minuscule town. What were the fucking odds, honestly. "I'm not supposed to talk about it, but...you're a ferrier. It's okay to talk about it if you're here," Brendon continued.

"Okay, what's a ferrier? What the fuck is going on?" Ray's brother demanded to know.

"I'm wondering that too, you're telling me _both_ of you died and then came back to life?" Otter asked, gesturing to Gerard and Brendon. "I thought you said that was rare!"

"It _is_ rare," Frank insisted. "It's only happened three times ever: the first was this woman who died in, like, the 1700s, I think? The second was this little kid like nine, ten years ago - I guess that's Brendon - and the third was Gerard. It almost _never_ happens."

"Who died? What are you _talking_ about?" Ray's brother continued, looking frustrated at being out of the loop in this bizarre conversation.

They all began to explain the story, from Gerard's snakebite to the scarecrows in the corn maze, and while Ray's brother just looked completely freaked out - and Gerard definitely didn't blame him - Brendon just listened thoughtfully. "So you're attracting evil spirits to yourself and your friends, and you don't know why? Hmm," he said, tapping his chin. "That's a tuffy."

"Wow," said Bob sarcastically. "Thanks for the input."

"I just don't get it," Brendon said. "It didn't happen to me. As long as everything got returned to its correct realm you should be fine." Wow, he really knew what he was talking about. Maybe Brendon should have been the ferrier instead of Frank, because he seemed a lot more confident in what he was talking about than Frank ever did when it came to how the Moon Realm worked. "Did you leave anything behind in the Moon Realm? Your phone or something?"

"No," Gerard said. "My phone didn't even come into the Moon Realm with me; none of my stuff did."

They were silent for a moment, and then Frank gasped. "Oh my god. Oh my _god_. The pendant! I forgot to take back the pendant!"

"The what?" asked Pete, furrowing his eyebrows.

"The _pendant_ ," Frank repeated. "Every person has a pendant necklace specifically assigned to them that they need to travel from realm to realm. That's a huge part of what ferriers do; we bring you your pendant so you can cross through the realms into the afterlife. I didn't take Gerard's pendant back. That's what's been attracting the spirits!"

"You forgot to take the pendant back?" Brendon asked disapprovingly, pushing up his glasses again. "That's like not saying goodbye on a Oujia board or something! That's leaving the door open to spirit attacks."

"So if you take the pendant back to the Moon Realm all this shit will stop?" Ray asked. "That's the solution?"

"I think so!" Frank said cheerily. He looked so happy to have figured it out that Gerard felt himself smiling too. He thought back on Frank's words in the clearing in the forest _\- No strings attached, promise -_ and almost laughed. No strings attached, except for the pendant, the _literal_ string attached.

"See, I knew we would be able to figure this out," Ray said matter-of-factly. "This plan worked out great. Like, way better than I expected, honestly."

Gerard was still smiling like a fucking idiot, but he couldn't even care. He wasn't gonna get himself and all his friends killed by evil spirits. They were actually gonna be _okay_. For the first time since he moved to Far Water, Gerard finally felt like he could let his guard down. "Ray Toro," he said fondly. "The man with a plan."

/

It was 3 AM by the time Gerard finally left Ray's house. They had spent hours in Ray's basement discussing all the shit that had happened to them that night - "I cannot believe _Brendon Urie_ of all people was, like, vital in solving this. Like, I would've believed the fact that he fucking died one time before I would've believed that his weird ghost knowledge actually had any basis," Pete had stated, shaking his head - and Frank fit in surprisingly well once they all got past the fact that he was, you know, a supernatural entity. Mostly everyone just probed him for facts about the afterlife - "So. Is Hell a legit thing? Just wondering," Bob had asked - but Frank had seemed to love the attention.

When Gerard got up to leave, Frank did too. "Woah, my sense of time is worse than I thought, it's three in the fucking morning," he said. "I gotta go figure out how to return the pendant, but I'll go get it from Gerard's house tomorrow night. Just...don't die for another 24 hours, and this'll all be over!" He winked at them and disappeared through the wall.

"You know, he's a cool guy," Patrick said thoughtfully. "Like, he's not human and that's kind of freaky, but he's still cool."

Gerard laughed. "I know _exactly_ what you mean."

Ray's house turned out be a five minute walk from Gerard's, and when he got home all the lights were off except for the one in Mikey's room so he figured he probably wasn't gonna get grounded for life or anything for staying out until 3 AM without telling his parents. Gerard had never really had a curfew or anything because he never actually had a reason to go out at night before that point other than to take a smoke break because his mom flipped when he smoked inside. His life, up until moving to Far Water, had been pretty much wholly uneventful. He really could never have seen all this shit coming.

He also didn't see it coming when he went up to his bedroom and found Frank already curled up in his bed. "Gee!" Frank exclaimed. "Jesus. You took forever to get here."

"What are you doing here?" Gerard asked, kicking off his dirty converse and climbing in the bed next to Frank. "I thought you had to go figure out how to return my pendant or whatever." Frank burrowed into his side and Gerard felt himself smiling again. He was such a fucking sucker for Frank's weird touchy cuddling bullshit.

"Nah, I'll do that tomorrow. I can only come to the Sun Realm at night anyway, so I'll just ask Lindsey how to return it tomorrow during the day. There's, like, a specific way to do it, I think," Frank said. He giggled. "Lindsey is gonna be _so_ mad when she finds out I forgot to take your pendant back, oh my _god_."

Gerard poked Frank's cheek. "What if I'm mad about it?" he joked. "I almost died back there."

Frank's face darkened. "I wouldn't have let that happen. I couldn't let them - they wanted to hurt you, Gee, I could tell. I could sense it. They wanted to _hurt_ you and I-I couldn't let that happen." He practically spit the words, his anger beginning to bubble up again. He gripped Gerard's arm. "I would've done anything, Gee. Anything for you."

Gerard was fairly certain he was either dreaming or dead for real. Frank had just straight-up said he would do "anything" to protect Gerard; there was no way he could possibly be misinterpreting that, right? "Anything for you" was the kind of shit people said to their _boyfriends_ , not their good platonic friend who they also cuddle with sometimes. Frank liked Gerard back. He _had_ to have. Gerard broke into a fucking cold sweat; the person he liked _almost certainly_ liked him back. This was uncharted territory. "What...were they gonna do?" he croaked out, unable to think of anything else to ask that wouldn't make him sound like the biggest, most lovesick idiot in the world.

"They wanted to hurt you, Gee. They wanted you to _suffer_. It was fucked up. They're evil; they're the kind of spirits that only cause pain, and...I couldn't let them do that to you," Frank said, shaking his head. He pressed his forehead against Gerard's; Gerard's breath got caught in his throat. "I _like_ you, Gee. I really, really like you."

Well, fucking _confirmed_. "I...I like you, too, Frankie. A lot. A _lot_ ," Gerard choked out. The words felt foreign in his mouth; Gerard had never, ever told anyone he liked them, because before this Gerard had never had a shot in hell with anyone he had ever liked. Everyone he had ever really liked before this had either barely acknowledged his existence or thought he was annoying. No one had ever _liked_ Gerard before. Most people had tolerated him at best - someone actually _liking_ him? It was a whole new experience, and it suddenly felt like he had seventeen years' worth of love nobody had ever wanted coursing through his veins like a shoot-em-up drug. Frank liked him. _Frank liked him._

Gerard barely even had time to process what was going on when he felt Frank's lips on his. Frank tasted exactly like the Moon Real smelled - gingerbread, incense, roses, nothing any normal human being would taste like - and his lip ring felt cold against Gerard's skin and Gerard's heart was literally about to beat right out of his chest. This was, admittedly, not his first kiss, but it might as well have been considering the fact that his brain just short-circuited completely the second Frank's lips touched his and he forgot how to kiss, and how to think, and how to fucking breathe. It barely felt real.

When Frank pulled away, he looked like he wanted to smile but was afraid to. "Was that...okay?" he whispered.

Gerard took a minute to catch his breath and, like, recover. Of course it was okay, it was better than fucking _okay_ , it was incredible, but he couldn't figure out how to make his mouth say that. "Yeah," he breathed. "It was okay."

Frank seemed to know what he meant and broke into the most beautiful smile Gerard had ever seen in his entire life. It was like every love song ever had just come to life, and Frank was the subject of all of them. Frank bumped his nose against Gerard's and whispered, "You know, I always wondered why everyone else had a person and I never did," he mused. "It was because I was waiting for you, I think." He chuckled and groaned, ducking his head. "Sorry. That sounded cheesy beyond fucking anything."

Gerard bit back a laugh. He had never really subscribed to the ideas of fate or destiny or that anything was ever meant to be just because the whole thing had never made any sense to him, but in that moment, even if it _was_ cheesy beyond anything, he swore he believed. He was, somehow, some way, meant to be with this glowing fucking punk elf, and he just knew it. "No, I think I know what you mean. I feel it too. Like I waited for you, or something. God, that sounds so lame."

"Worth the wait?" Frank asked, poking Gerard's cheek, giggling his weird twinkly giggle again.

He took Frank's forever-freezing hand in his. "Worth the wait," he replied.

/

Gerard could not stop fucking smiling the next day, even though he knew somebody was gonna notice something was up because it 1. was completely out-of-character for him and 2. made him look like an absolute tool, but he couldn't help it. Frank had kissed him. Sure, other people had kissed Gerard before, but no one had ever looked like him the way Frank did, and it wasn't because Frank's eyes were borderline lightbulbs. Frank looked at Gerard like he was a prize he'd just won, greasy hair and all. It was surreal.

He was trying to sketch a thumbnail for an upcoming project in his art class, but every drawing turned into some Moon Realm shit - grinning jack-o-lanterns, Lindsey's dog, the hearts in the forest, the fairies, and, of fucking course, Frank - when Mikey came in his room to investigate. "What's with you and the smiling? I know you, like, have friends now and shit and you're happy about it, but it's getting creepy."

Gerard wondered what it said about a person when _being happy_ was considered uncharacteristic and weird for them. Probably nothing that great. "What? I'm just happy," he lied completely unconvincingly, glancing up from his sketches.

"Mmhmm," Mikey hummed, raising one eyebrow and managing to say "I don't believe you", "You're a shit liar", and "Nice try, asshole" all in that one muscle movement. Mikey had truly perfected the art of nonverbal communication. "Yeah. Okay. Who's the guy you've been sneaking in here every night?"

Gerard remembered at that moment that Mikey's light had been on when he had gotten home the night before. Mikey had for sure heard what had gone down between him and Frank. Mikey had heard all the Nicholas Sparks-level cheesy shit they had said. Wow. Gerard wondered if it was possible to commit suicide with nothing but a 7B pencil and the concentrated power of will. "I told you before. It's Pete and the guys. On Skype."

Mikey rolled his eyes and turned around. "Okay. When you're ready to talk about your boyfriend, I'll be here," he said on his way out of Gerard's room.

When Frank showed up that night, the first thing Gerard said to him was, "Okay, we need to keep it the fuck down from now on, because my brother heard us in here last night. I told him I was talking to my friends on Skype, but he, like, definitely did not buy it."

Frank didn't say anything. He turned towards the window, looking out at the cemetery, the school, the forest, and desert beyond. He stood ram-rod straight, arms crossed behind his back, and he didn't turn to look at Gerard. "Frank?" Gerard asked, unsettled.

Frank still didn't turn away from the window, but Gerard swore he heard him sigh. "Gee...there's not gonna be a next time, I don't think."

Gerard almost felt his heart stop. "What?"

Frank's shoulders slumped. "There's not gonna be a next time. After I take your pendant I can't come back anymore."

Gerard got up and physically turned Frank's shoulders to look at him. Frank looked...different. It wasn't like Gerard had never seen Frank express negative emotions before - he had seen him, of course, furiously angry, and completely disgusted when Gerard first played him an All Time Low song ("This is considered punk now? What the fuck. We're doomed," Frank had lamented), but Gerard had never seen him like this. His eyes were so dull that Gerard was startled by them. "What do you mean?" he asked breathlessly. "Why can't you come back?

"I-" Frank started, but cut himself off, seeming to be looking for the right words. "You know how it was hard to get you back to the Sun Realm after you died? Like, you couldn't just cross right back over, we had to do shit to get you back? It's...like that for ferriers. It isn't easy for us to cross between the Sun Realm and the Moon Realm."

"That doesn't make sense," Gerard argued. "You come here all the time!"

Frank didn't meet Gerard's eyes. "Before this I had only come to the Sun Realm, like, twice since becoming a ferrier. There was...no real reason to come before, you know?" He shuffled his feet. "But now you were here, and you were nice and funny and _fucking cute_ and I wanted to come see you, so I tried crossing over and it was, like, way easier than I remembered..." He trailed off.

"And?" Gerard pressed.

"I thought crossing over was easier than before because it was so close to Halloween. That's when the boundaries between the realms are the thinnest," Frank explained. He took a deep breath. "But it wasn't. It was because your pendant was here."

Gerard's mind was completely boggled. "I thought my pendant let me cross between realms, not you." He fingered the pendant; he had put it on a few hours earlier to make sure he didn't forget to give it back to Frank. Jesus, who knew a fucking _necklace_ would cause this much trouble.

Frank still didn't meet Gerard's eyes. "I thought that too, but it's...more powerful than I thought. Every human has their pendant assigned to them, right? Well, apparently your ferrier is assigned to you too," he said. "I thought it was just, like, random, but it's not. Every person I bring over is specifically assigned to me, and I'm...connected to their pendants, in a way. The reason I could cross over so easily is because your pendant was here."

Gerard completely, totally did not follow. "What?" he asked. "Just... _What_?"

Frank sighed and sat down on Gerard's bed. He patted next to him, motioning for Gerard to sit down too. "You were assigned to me, right? Do you get that part?" he asked. Gerard nodded. "Your pendant was assigned to me, too, in a way. Since it's here, in the Sun Realm, I can cross over here easily. When I take it back, nothing will be tying me here anymore, and it'll be way harder for me to come. Like, almost impossible."

Gerard sort of understood, but he could barely accept what he was hearing. If Frank took his pendant back, Gerard might never see him again (or, at least, not for another 70 years or whatever the fuck). Frank was gonna be gone, away in the Moon Realm, where Gerard would never get to see him or touch him or kiss him or hear his weird fucking twinkly laugh. Someone finally loved Gerard, and the relationship was gonna get cut short after one goddamn day due to some kind of spirit-world limitations. Fucking _figured_. "What if you don't take my pendant back?" Gerard bartered. "The spirits don't go after me that much. It's only happened twice. It's not that bad. I can deal with it."

Frank shook his head. "Gee. I can't do that. You'll get hurt. If I hadn't shown up in time those scarecrows would've wiped you guys the fuck out. It's too dangerous." He took Gerard's hand and fiddled with the fingers, looking at the floor. "I want to see you again, trust me, this isn't my choice. There's nothing I can do." He finally looked up at Gerard; his eyes looked suspiciously shiny. Holy shit, if Frank started crying Gerard was gonna be finished. It would be the most heart-wrenching thing Gerard could ever see, probably make _him_ cry, and then make it him feel ten times worse about the whole situation because Frank would be crying _because_ of him.

Gerard's head hurt and his eyes stung. "Isn't there _anything_ we can do? Anything at all?" His voice sounded miserable; he let his hair fall over his eyes to cover them.

Frank laughed a little sadly and pushed Gerard's hair back out of his eyes. "God, your hair is greasy," he mumbled. He twirled a lock of it around his fingers. "I've never met anyone like you, you know that? I don't wanna...never see you again, but there's literally no option. There's nothing. We're fucking stuck: if I take the pendant we can never see each other, if I don't you're gonna get killed. It's a no-win situation." He looked away for a second. "Unless..."

"Unless what?" Gerard asked, a little too quickly, but at this point he didn't really care if he sounded like a clingy bitch anymore. This could seriously be last time he saw Frank for another _seven decades_ ; the time to cling was now.

Frank shook his head. "Never mind. You would never wanna do it, and even if you did, I wouldn't let you."

"Do _what_?" Gerard pushed. Here was the chance to actually be able to stay with Frank - how bad could it possibly be?

Frank sighed. "Become a ferrier. You could - _could_ , this is hypothetical, I'm not gonna fucking let you do it - become a ferrier and...do this with me," he said. Gerard felt his eyes widen. That was a thing? People could become ferriers? What the fuck, since when? "I could never let you do that. You would have to give up your entire life. You would almost never get to see your family or your friends or anyone ever again, and you have a great future ahead of you and shit," Frank continued. "You're gonna go to college, art school or something, right? You're gonna be amazing, baby. I couldn't take that away from you. If I had had the kind of life you do I never would've become a ferrier." His voice sounded almost wistful.

Gerard's jaw was practically on the floor; he was so surprised to find out Frank had been human that he didn't even have time to react to Frank calling him "baby". Frank had said he "didn't originate in the Moon Realm" or something to that effect before, but Gerard had never made the connection that he had been _human_. Maybe that was just because Gerard was a fucking idiot, but Frank seemed so otherworldly it was hard to imagine he ever could've been just a normal, mortal person. Gerard had just assumed he had sprung into existence fully-formed, lip ring and all. "You were _human_? What? When?"

Frank laughed a little again. "You sound so surprised. All ferriers were human at some point. That's why we have so many more rules that normal Moon Realm spirits don't. They can cross over whenever the fuck they want; we can't. It's so fucking unfair."

"How did you become a ferrier? How does that even work?" Gerard asked.

Frank was silent for a long moment. "Are you ready for my, uh, tragic backstory?" he asked, trying to make a joke out of something that clearly wasn't gonna be funny. He smiled weakly. Gerard nodded solemnly. Frank took a deep breath. "So. When I was born, my parents were already, like, on the rocks as fuck. They were both totally toxic people who shouldn't have been together in the first place, and they were never, ever gonna work out, so bringing a baby into that mess only made everything way worse."

"When were you born? What year?" Gerard asked, already pretty afraid of where this story was going because no story that started with someone referring to their parents as 'toxic' ever ended well, but he was completely, morbidly curious of every detail.

"1981, I'm...pretty sure? Details are hazy. I had a bad memory already, and then becoming a ferrier, like, jumbled all my memories. I can never remember exactly when things in my human life took place anymore," Frank supplied. 1981; it was the first piece of actual context of Frank's existence Gerard had ever gotten. "Don't worry, I'm not, like, a freaky pedophile or anything!" Frank defended quickly. "You stop aging at however old you become a ferrier. I was 17, almost 18, I _think_."

"1981, toxic parents, okay, got it so far." Gerard motioned for Frank to continue.

Frank nodded. "Anyway. When I was little, maybe five or six, my dad just walked out completely. Like, gone for good, gone with the fucking wind, no one ever heard from him again. My mom was this super devout Catholic - like, the kind that take it _way_ too far - and she was already totally nuts before he left, but that was the final straw. She decided he was the devil, like, the _actual_ devil, and he had come to earth in a human form specifically to ruin her. I'm dead serious." Frank laughed with no humor. "So, since he was the devil, then I was _part_ devil, and I wasn't worthy of anybody's love, but especially not hers considering my dad, the devil, had ruined her life."

Gerard could tell exactly where this story was going. "Did she...hurt you?"

Frank fiddled with Gerard's fingers again. "Yeah. Instead of, I don't know, giving me up for adoption or whatever the standard protocol for when you suddenly decide you hate your child is, she thought if she hit me enough then she might be able to beat the devil out of me. It didn't help that my birthday was fucking Halloween, because to her that was just _confirmation_ that I was, for sure, part devil, and she was doing the right thing. She was so fucked up, man."

Gerard was getting hit with so much info he could barely process it all; Frank was human, he was abused as a kid, apparently his birthday was Halloween? "That's...awful, Frankie. That's fucking terrible." He laced Frank's fingers through his.

"I know," Frank replied. Gerard felt compelled to hold him, to shield from the mother in his story. If Frank was this small now, he must have been fucking miniature as a kid - what the hell was wrong with people? How could she have beat this tiny, defenseless kid? "It wasn't just beatings, either. She'd do these bizarre, mean things to me all the time. I remember one time for, like, a week, every night she told me she made mac and cheese, because that was my favorite food, and then she would hand me a plate with literally uncooked macaroni on it and told me if I didn't eat it then I would just have to starve that night. If I complained about it she would hit me with a belt and then read me bible verses about what happens to sinners. I was eight years old or something." Frank shook his head. "She did so much weird shit like that."

Gerard was at a complete loss for words. He couldn't even imagine going through what Frank had. It made him so angry his hands started shaking. "I'm so sorry, Frank. Holy shit. That's _horrible_."

Frank pushed a lock of hair behind Gerard's ear. "It's okay. I mean, it wasn't okay _then_ , but it was a long time ago." He shrugged. "Anyway. So, you know how the spirits like Allegra and Reed and the scarecrows are attracted to you because your pendant is here?" he asked. Gerard nodded. "There are spirits like them that are attracted to pendants - they're never supposed to talk to humans because they're dangerous, but I learned they try to kill humans whose pendants are here to get the pendant. That's why they kept finding you." He grimaced. "But some spirits are attracted to different things. There are spirits - good ones, they're like guardian angels - that are attracted to people who have been through trauma. They come to help."

"And one of them found you?" Gerard assumed.

Frank nodded. "Yep. It was one night when it was just way too much. I was a teenager by then, and - I guess was I was a senior, because I was trying to get into college so I could, you know, escape my mom. She had told me point-blank she wasn't going to pay for me to go to college, so I needed a scholarship to go. At this point I had applied everywhere and was just getting my acceptances and rejections and shit, but so far nowhere had given me a full ride, and that's what I needed. My mom wasn't gonna pay for anything. I know those aren't easy to get, but...it was the last hope I had, you know?" Gerard's heart literally clenched listening to Frank's story. "So I had just gotten the last letter from the last school I applied to. It was, like, a bigger package and shit, so I knew it was an acceptance, but when I opened it...no scholarship. Like, that was it. I wasn't gonna get to go to college. I was gonna be trapped with my mom. I knew I couldn't do that - she was gonna literally kill me someday, and I knew it. So I decided, like, you know what, fuck her, I won't give her the satisfaction. I'll do it myself."

Gerard actually gasped out loud. "You...killed yourself? Holy shit!"

"No!" Frank exclaimed. "I was going to, but then...This woman appeared in my room. I could tell she wasn't human because she was glowing and practically floating off the floor. It was weird - you'd think I would've flipped out, this random spirit woman appeared in my bedroom, but her presence was...calming. I thought it was an angel." Frank smiled at the memory. "Her name was Jamia; she was one of the guardian angel-type spirits. She basically explained to me that she had been watching over me and that she didn't want me to do anything to myself because she wanted me to be a ferrier. She explained, like, what that was and shit, and it sounded...so nice to me, you know? I would get to help people and no one could hurt me anymore. It was like a win-win."

Gerard was practically in tears listening to Frank's story. Hearing Frank say "no one could hurt him anymore" made him feel an actual pain in his chest. "So...you became one? How did that work?" he asked.

Frank rested his head on Gerard's shoulder. "It happens in the Southern Forest - that's where we brought you back to life, remember? That's the only other time I've been there." He smiled lopsidedly and looked up at Gerard through his eyelashes. "I've never, ever regretted it. Not for one second. I've been so much happier as a ferrier than I ever was as a human."

Gerard wrapped his arm around Frank. This was _too much_. "Didn't your mom wonder what happened to you?"

Frank nodded. "Yeah. I was reported missing a few weeks later - a few _weeks_." Frank rolled his eyes. "No one ever could find me though, obviously. My case was on _Unsolved Mysteries_ one time; Lindsey and I watched it and took a tally of every time they said I was gone 'without a trace'."

Gerard almost jumped up. "That's - that's how Patrick knew you!" he exclaimed. "He said you looked familiar - he must have seen you on TV!"

Frank giggled a little. "Oh, yeah. I'm fucking famous."

Then they were silent for a little while, slumped on Gerard's bed, the only sound in the room their breathing. After the laughter petered out, there wasn't anything funny about it anymore. There really was no way for this to work out. This was it. There was no way for them to stay together. Gerard felt his eyes prickle again.

When he felt a few tears slip out, he started to swat them away, because god knows he never wanted to cry in front of anybody, but Frank beat him to it. "Don't cry, baby," he whispered, wiping under Gerard's eyes. "I...I wish there was something I could do."

Frank reached up and pulled Gerard's face in to kiss him. It only made Gerard more upset; he had never been good with endings to begin with, but things with Frank were ending when they had barely gotten to fucking start.

He couldn't go be ferrier like Frank or anything. He had a family he loved so much it made his heart hurt to even think about never seeing them again. He couldn't leave them. He was gonna have to give up Frank, and even if he knew that was technically the right thing to do, it didn't make it hurt any less.

"What about...what about Halloween?" Gerard asked, his voice sounding garbled and thick with tears. "You said...the boundaries are thin, or something."

Frank's eyes widened. For the first time, Gerard saw some glow return to them. "Oh my god - you're right, Gee! We can see each other on Halloween!"

Gerard almost didn't believe it. Sure, seeing Frank once a year wouldn't be ideal in the fucking slightest, but it sounded amazing when the alternative was wasn't seeing Frank until he was in his eighthes. "We _can_?" he breathed.

"Yes!" Frank exclaimed, hopping up off the bed. "On Halloween we can cross over with no problem! I didn't think of it because I always stay in the Moon Realm on Halloween; it's our biggest holiday. It's a lot of fun. I can come here to get you, and then we can go through a portal together and you can spend Halloween there with me!" He was smiling, but his eyes still looked sad. "It's not the best, it's only once a year. But I promise, Gee, as long as you want me to...I'll come back for you."

Gerard was smiling sadly too. "I'll always want you, Frankie. Promise."

Frank shook his head. "It doesn't have to be a romantic thing forever, Gee. You're...gonna find someone, someday, who you can be with every day, not just once a year, and I promise I'll be happy for you. The most important thing to me is that we can still be friends. I always wanna be your friend."

Gerard couldn't imagine ever loving anyone who wasn't Frank, but he knew Frank was right. He knew someday, somehow he would find someone, and that person wouldn't be Frank - no one ever could be - but he would love them as much. He wouldn't love them the same; he could never love someone the _way_ he loved Frank, but he could love them the same amount. But even if and when that person came along, no matter what, he still wanted to be Frank's friend. He'd always want to be Frank's _something_. "I always will want to be your friend. Always."

Frank pulled him in and kissed him again, and it was still sad this time, but there was a shed of hope in it. Frank's lip ring clicked against his teeth. "Friends forever, right?" Frank whispered with a giggle.

Gerard laughed back. "Friends for fucking life."

Frank's eyes widened. "Wait! After you die - when you're _supposed_ to - then we can stay together. You can live in the Moon Realm then! You can stay!" he said, sounding truly happy. He thought for a minute, and then his smile dropped a little. "I mean, if you want to. That's a long, long time from now, but if you want to, you can stay."

"Won't I be, like, old and gross and shit?" Gerard joked. He pushed his forehead against Frank's.

Frank smiled. "Nope! In the afterlife everyone's young again. Only ferriers stay whatever age they were, because we, like, never actually died."

"I guess it's settled then. I'll see you once a year until then," Gerard said. Saying it out loud made it feel permanent in a way it didn't before; this was it. He was gonna see Frank once a year from now on. It was, like, the Halloween version of Frosty the Snowman or some shit. It made him feel a little sick to his stomach, but he was...happy, in a way. Frank would always come back for him.

"Worth the wait?" Frank asked. He was smiling.

Gerard smiled back. "Always worth the wait."

/

Frank stayed until morning, and it was just like the first few times he came to Gerard's house at night; they talked and talked, curled up under Gerard's mountain of blankets, until morning light streamed in through Gerard's window.

Frank sat up. "I guess...it's my time to go," he said.

It was Halloween, but Frank had already told Gerard he couldn't come to the Moon Realm this year. It was too dangerous for him; he had to let a little time go by to let everything where the evil spirits had, you know, tried to fucking kill him cool off. This was the last time he was gonna see Frank for a whole year.

Gerard wrapped his arms around him and hugged him so tightly he was almost afraid Frank would break. "I'm gonna miss you, Frankie. A lot."

Frank looked up at him. "Just remember I'm coming back for you. I'll always come back." He reached around Gerard's neck and pulled his pendant off. "Look on the bright side: once I return this, you don't have to worry about monster scarecrows anymore!"

Gerard kissed him, and Frank tugged on a lock of his hair one last time, and then he passed back through Gerard's wall, out towards the cemetery. When Gerard looked out the window, he didn't see Frank anywhere, but he heard his car fading into the distance: _clank, clank, clank_.

/

That night, Ray invited everyone back to his basement to celebrate Halloween and the fact that they weren't gonna die in another drive-by spirit attack now that Gerard's pendant had been returned. They huddled on Ray's couch with the weird stains and, mostly, argued over what movies they should watch. It was so normal and suburban and high school. It was what Gerard had always been missing.

"We're not watching _Witch's Night Out_ ," Otter said, throwing a handful of Reese's Pieces at Pete. "We're not fucking ten."

"Wow, rude. It's a classic!" Pete argued, throwing some back. They scattered as they hit the basement floor.

"Guys! I'm gonna have enough trouble cleaning this shit up as is! You're not helping!" Ray exclaimed, attempting to grab a few airborne Reese's Pieces.

"You _clean_ down here, Toro? Since when?" Bob asked.

Ray pushed his shoulder. "I hate all of you, you're all fucking animals. Put on _Witch's Night Out._ "

Gerard laughed, and he wished with everything he fucking had that Frank could be there with them, but something was telling him that he'd be...okay, for real this time. He had friends and someone watching out for him from the fucking great beyond, and things were going to be _okay_.

The basement window was open, and the moon beamed down, and Gerard swore he could smell something on the wind blowing in, something that smelled like incense and gingerbread and roses. If he listened closely, and the wind blew just right, he could almost, _almost_ hear a faint, familiar melody:

_So come find me next time you hear this tune,_

_we'll roll with the fog, we'll bark at the moon,_

_and though now we are parted, have no tears or fright -_

_this is never goodbye, only good night._

Gerard smiled _. Never goodbye, only good night._

_Clank, clank, clank._


End file.
